I have now seen aurora two times.
The first was when my folks and I were living at 818 in Moorhead, Minnesota. I remember standing in the front yard, looking straight up, seeing pale greenish patches shifting. It looked a bit like drifting fog or blowing snow would, looking at a car’s headlights; but with no headlights.
That’s as lyrically descriptive as I’ll try today.
Then, yesterday evening (Tuesday, November 11, 2025), our third-oldest daughter came to my desk and told me that I should see the aurora. So did our son, as I was heading for the front door.
Earlier, while our oldest daughter and I were doing our usual chat, she texted ‘aura alert! brb’. Later, we discussed the difficulty of seeing aurora with eyes that detect colors quite well in daylight: but are distinctly sub-par at night.
Anyway, I lurched out the front door, hung onto one of the porch’s pillars, raised the other arm to block street lights, and enjoyed watching a wavering patch of indistinct red light. Mostly it was in the west-northwest.
My son told me there was more overhead. I believe him, but getting myself down to ground level would have been more work than — well, basically, I enjoyed what I could see and was thankful for that.
I’m told that our son-in-law got some photos. He’s got a device that’s good in low light levels, and a very steady hand. I’ll probably see those, next time we get together.
That “SEVERE Geomagnetic Storm ALERT” from the Space Weather Prediction Center is the sort of thing that’d have been science fiction in my youth.
These days, for folks like me, it’s mainly a ‘heads up’, letting me know there’s a chance to see a light show.
For others, who take care of today’s continent-spanning power grids and those parts of our infrastructure which orbit Earth, it signals that it’s time to use procedures developed for such circumstances.
There’s more to say about aurora, physics, science, being human, and God. But I’ve talked about that before:
- “Stearns County Fair 2025: Lightning, Hail, and Then Blue Skies” (August 16, 2025)
- “Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A: Cool Images of Hot Gas” (December 16, 2023)
- “God Doesn’t Make Junk” (January 14, 2018)
- “No More Sunspots?” (December 8, 2017)
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