Aurora Borealis Visits Texas
On Friday evening I started seeing folks from around the world posting their aurora borealis photos, not long after sunset. I saw a news snippet or two that said it might be seen as far as some of the southern states but I’d heard that before and it never panned out. Chris started seeing the posts as well and decided to head outside, just in case. He came back in and said something along the lines of, “I think it’s reddish pink outside but I’m not certain.” So, we turned off all the lights in and out of the house and walked down to the pond to look. Sure enough, it did seem reddish, or at least different but it wasn’t until I put my phone up to take what I thought for sure was going to be a very dumb, worthless photo did I realize, wow my eyes couldn’t capture it but my phone sure could! We stood outside for 10-15 minutes, taking a few photos, trying to grasp what we were seeing with our eyes, and I think somewhat in disbelief at what we were seeing until we looked at more photos and everyone else’s photos were indeed pink and purple, not the typical green that we associate with the aurora. I texted my friends and parents and told them to go outside. One friend in College Station managed to see it, too, but my parents in DFW couldn’t due to light pollution. By 9:45 the event was really over, though I had hoped we’d get to see it again over the weekend but clouds thwarted that and the solar flare itself wasn’t nearly as active as it had been on Friday. So, I guess we’ll count ourselves lucky, to see two amazing celestial events within a month of each other!
3 Comments
Patrice La Vigne
So glad you caught the event!! And hopefully there will be more in the next year before we go into the 11-year solar minimum period. I wrote an article about aurora myths for Territory Supply that should post soon, and of course one of the points is that the colors are better seen through the camera lens versus the naked eye.
shoreacres
Here’s a tidbit I picked up after the fact.
After seeing almost all-pink images from Texas, I did some exploring and found an explanation. Dr. Marshall Shepherd explained that pink shows up at altitudes above 150 miles, due to low levels of oxygen at that altitude. Green is found between 60-150 miles, and blue and purple are up to 60 miles, where ionized molecular nitrogen affects the color more than oxygen. I suppose that videos showing curtains of different colors have the excited molecules cruising around at different altitudes.
Ray
Hi Misti!
Thought I’d give you a heads up I’m now getting a security warning when I visit your website, likely due to your SSL cerificate expiring or domain name in the certificate not matching. You’ll want to holler at your web host about that.
Hope ya get it sorted!
Ray