Mars hangs above a water silo aglow with lights from the school, a band of auroral light seeming to shoot from the silo like flames. (Click on photos for larger images.)
No photo – and certainly not our first attempts – can do justice to a northern sky on fire and dancing with the eerie green and purple glow of an Aurora Borealis. On this night 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, temperatures were an icy negative 10, pushed even lower by a steady breeze. As the sun sank below the frozen sea to the west, the full moon emerged in the east, close to Earth and huge, the color of a blood orange, hanging on the horizon. Jupiter and Venus were aligned, Mars glowed red as an ember against the black sky and Orion’s belt burned bright. Washing over it all was a breathtaking display of slowly moving green bands, some of them edged in purple, some of them jagged and electric, the band on the northern horizon streaked with pink mixed in with the green.
It’s not uncommon to see a bit of faint green or greenish yellow in the night sky up here. But what we were seeing on this night was of a different magnitude – a rare event tracing back to a spike in activity on the Sun a a few days ago. We made a few quick phone calls to friends. “Go outside and look up!” Meanwhile we got our camera and gear together, realizing, suddenly, that we weren’t sure how to capture any of this. We met one of our friends in front of the school and walked with her toward the lagoon on the north side of town, away from the lights. In every direction, from horizon to horizon and straight overhead, what we saw stunned us. “This is amazing,” we kept repeating.
Note the three aligned stars of Orion’s belt to the left.
By the time we got our camera figured out, our fingers hurt with cold and the peak of the lights was past. But we still got some photos. A large part of photography is capturing light, and this was a quest for capturing light on a sublime scale.
Fireworks over the Columbia River while sharing a bottle of wine from a balcony at my apartment in Astoria, Oregon, tumblers of Scotch and a sky so impossibly filled with stars we felt like the deck of our mountain cabin in Yosemite was sailing through the Milky Way, a full moon hanging over a becalmed ocean on Prince William Sound with not another boat on the water, a campfire, mesmerizing, at our tent site at Oregon’s Sunset Bay State Park… night skies to come in remote anchorages on the Pacific… Our lives are filled with light.
CutterLight 
Wonderful words and loved your photos! I have experienced the Aurora Borealis, but did not get to take pictures, hopefully next time!
Thank you.
I thought of you both when the news media announced the sun spot activities and resulting Aurora Borealis seen as far down as Michigan. The photos, I’m sure, only hint at the magnificent display you experienced in the heavens above. Does this occur regularly in the night sky or was this a rare event for you all abiding above the actic circle? Pardon my lack of knowledge. You are my first friends to live so far north and I delight in reading your blogs.
We are actually a little too far north to see the best ones. We thought we would see them much more often than we have. These were the best of the five times we’ve seen them. The news said these were the most intense since 2006. They were phenomenal!
Beautiful photos! Must have been an amazing experience…
Oh wow… It’s a dream of mine to see the Northern Lights, I imagine it to be an experience that defies description! You have done a great job of sharing it with us though.
You had me at the bottle of wine! That and a beautiful view 🙂
We miss bottles of wine…
Amazing.
Fantastic! I am yet to see the Northern Lights but I have seen the Australis Borealis in southern Australa
I was just reading about the Australis Borealis… way cool.
Long time ago when I was a teenager, but will never forget it! Hope to get up north again and see the lights, I slept through them one night in Churchill, Manitoba 😦
Came across your blog in a search to help a friend find a name for her website, and thought you might like a group I started on Facebook a while back: Aurora Shooters.
Just type it into the facebook search box. It’s a fun group of aurora lovers who work together so we don’t miss aurora shows, and help each other improve our aurora photos. Looks like you guys already have had a taste of the “addiction” LOL
There’s a show building right now…
Kimberly
Hi Kimberly. Thanks for checking out our site! Are you up here in Alaska? Unfortunately, during the school year from mid-August through mid-May, we are not able to access Facebook as it is blocked by our school district’s server (which is the server we use for Internet access). We use the University of Fairbanks forecast site: http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast. Happy Aurora watching!
This is a bucket list item for me. Awesome. What a thrill to capture it with your camera!
Wonderful stuff! It is truly one of nature’s finest shows. I’ve seen it twice (in Finland) – but never even tried to capture it… something to do with slide film, being on a budget on not having a clue where to start with night photography!