Aurora Watch

A view of the aurora from a campsite near ours on 10 October. It wasn’t quite this colorful to the naked eye.

The universe hasn’t been kind to us lately, and I mean that literally. All the time we were in the Upper Peninsula, we were hoping to see an aurora. Even starting in the northern section of the lower peninsula, I was checking space weather every day, seeing if there might be an aurora that night. For those that don’t know, the Space Weather Center isn’t science fiction, it’s a real thing that’s part of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA). They monitor coronal mass ejections (CME) and among other, more important things, predict if an aurora will be seen in a particular place.

So, I checked every day. Nothing until we were at Porcupine Mountains, in the Western UP. Then there was a chance! Well, we missed it. It happened well after we went to bed on a night that they didn’t place a high chance of there being one. We found out the next day when some people on a trail asked us if we saw it. We didn’t. It took most everyone by surprise. They said it was great. I could have done without knowing.

Then in Wisconsin there was a chance again. They’re much less common at that latitude, but we were hopeful. Then that night we saw it, sort of. We noticed a sort of glow to the night sky, almost like light pollution. I set up my camera and could see the colors through photos (and a few adjustments in Lightroom). It was neat. That night we kept hoping it would get better, but it didn’t. At least it didn’t until we gave up. According to people in town, and people on the radio, it got much better about an hour after we stopped checking.

It was supposed to happen again the next night. This time we were ready. We drove to a dark place with a good view of the north sky. We stayed out there for hours, but no avail. If one happened, we never heard about it, but I did rather enjoy sitting out there looking at the sky.

We had a clear view of the northern sky the next night, but we didn’t get to see an aurora.

Our other cosmic adventure was trying to see comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3), a recently discovered comet that last passed Earth about 80,000 years ago. Every time we tried to see it, clouds got in our way, literally. We still have a chance tonight, so maybe we’ll see it.

I’m a little sad we missed the full spectacle of the aurora, but I’m glad we at least got a taste.