Readers’ wildlife photos

October 18, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have some photographs by Lou Jost of the recent Aurora Borealis that was visible from the U.S.  Lou’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Although Lou works in Ecuador as a biologist, he was visiting the U.S. and saw this as lagniappe:

The earth has just moved through one of the strongest solar storms of the last century, and on Oct 10 this produced one of the most spectacular displays of aurora borealis ever seen in the midwest US. There were  even reports of aurora borealis as far south as Mexico and Puerto Rico!

I was visiting my brother that night in southern Wisconsin near the Illinois border. He saw the NASA aurora forecast and we decided to head out to a dark spot to see what we could see. We had heard that mostly it would be invisible to the naked eye and we would need to use a telephone camera to see the colors. But even while we were driving the car to our dark spot, we began to see faint moving bands of light in the sky,

When we got to the dark spot we were astonished to see deep red lights mixed with pale teal green stripes. I thought the aurora was always just green but I now know that especially powerful solar storms make reds and purples and blues too. We saw all those colors, pulsing and re-grouping into stripes and swirls. I had never seen aurora borealis in my whole life, so I was deeply surprised by this display. It was captured by many observers around the country but I think what we saw in Wisconsin was as stunning and colorful as anywhere.

The attached photos are unedited straight-off-the-telephone handheld shots taken by Paul Jost and Ayesha Abbassi; the hooded head in one of the photos is me. The bright light on the lower left corner of one shot is the half-moon, blurred by camera movement.  I am sure this would have been visible from dark areas outside of Chicago, and maybe even from the Chicago lakeshore looking out at the darker skies above Lake Michigan. The aurora changes very quickly and it is necessary to watch the aurora forecast, which is based on actual solar activity measurements made from a space satellite, and it has a 35 minute lead time.

There are many good websites that discuss the complex causes of the aurora. I learned that the red we saw was very unusual and probably caused by oxygen excitation hundreds of kilometers above the earth, while greens are caused  by a different oxygen energy level emission lower in the atmosphere.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/-articles-aps-v8-i1-c9.htm

https://www.theaurorazone.com/about-the-aurora/the-science-of-the-northern-lights/the-northern-lights-colours/

https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/northern-lights/colours-of-northern-lights.asp

17 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photos”

  1. Awesome!

    I saw it too! This set is way more detailed though – I was at 42.3 degrees N, with stray city/street lights from afar. Timing was critical – I checked again in the middle of the night – clear, but no aurora.

    It’s funny – I don’t know how to get a “naked eye” view of it.

    1. We were at almost the same latitude, 42.66 degrees. My brother researched the activity records later that night, and he found there was a much more powerful event about three hours after the event that we saw. Probably everyone seriously interested in auroras went out to see the 9pm event we saw, and went to bed afterward, missing the far more impressive event later that night.

      1. You guys are killing me! My wife and I were in rural Wisconsin visiting family at latitude 42.6–the next night!

        Well, we greatly appreciate the photos of what we missed.

  2. Fantastic shots! How lucky you were to have experienced that. Since reading about it as a child, I’ve been fascinated by the aurora. I saw it once in Northern KY as a teen, but it was just a yellowish curtain, with little movement. People in my vicinity (south central PA) saw it on Oct. 10, but I unfortunately did not. Although I am a technology sceptic in many ways, the internet is certainly wonderful for the postings of the aurora and other phenomena.

  3. Great pictures! I’ve never seen an aurora, but my mother did when she was a child. She has told me (several times) that her father her and her sister out of bed one night and drove to a dark hill near her house, and that’s where she saw it. That was 80 years ago and she still remembers it.

  4. I saw it for the first time ever, too, but only a dark red glow that my phone camera captured. The Pittsburgh area only seemed to get red, but my second cousin got red and green in Corolla, N Carolina (Outer Banks). Northern lights in North Carolina!

    1. Very nice!

      We could clearly see large patches of saturated red color with our eyes, so this is not an effect of the phone. In fact all the colors in my photographs were similar to what we were seeing with our eyes, just brighter in the phone. That was for me the most interesting part, the colorfulness of the show.

      The red is supposed to be more prominent in the most intense storms, like this one.

      1. WOW

        … all I could see by eye during both auroras was a light green something-or-another at best.

        In any case, technology clearly opening up the scope where before, might miss it at lower latitudes.

        Then again, these solar storms or sunspots also follow a pattern – round about 13 years, IIRC…

        Such a great experience!

  8. Small world! We drove outside of town that same night and got a bunch of very similar pictures. Cell phones do a great job at enhancing the aurora.
    The colors have some meaning, in that high energy solar particles excite atmospheric gases, and electrons in these gases dump off their energy by emitting photons. Green and red light comes from oxygen, with the red coming from high atmosphere oxygen. There are other colors too.
    More details can be found here: https://www.space.com/aurora-colors-explained

  9. I saw the aurora from suburban St. Louis as a 19 year-old on February 11, 1958.
    I have red/green color deficient vision, so it’s remarkable I could see it at all, but I shared in the oohs and ahs of those around me. A little internet sleuthing confirmed the exact date.

  10. Great photos.

    I saw the northern lights in the Yukon (at 63.9° N) in the early winter of 1973.

    They were spectacular.

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