Aurora borealis

Lake Ontario, NY

Saturday 1 June 2024 65 °F

MAY 10, 2024:

A rare non-birding post: on May 10, my friends Jiabao, Ömer, Savannah, and I had the immense privilege of witnessing the strongest showing of Northern Lights in New York State since 2003 — right along the Lake Ontario shoreline. It was a most spectacular event caused by a massive solar storm.

We pulled into the parking lot next to the lake and Jiabao immediately noticed what looked like streaky fog in the sky above us, which I initially wrote off as cirrus clouds. Soon; however, especially once we pointed our phone cameras to the sky, it was clear that we were actually encountering a most magnificent showing of Aurora Borealis. Interestingly enough, the colors showed up much clearer in cameras and phone cameras than in real life.

At first, the glow was reddish, reflecting in the water of a pond right next to the parking lot.

Then, more purple hues dominated:

There were about a dozen other cars parked there at this point, chasing the Aurora, and a group of folks urged us to stand alongside the Lake Ontario shoreline and we were NOT disappointed. The lights came and went in waves — sometimes just a faint mist-like showing of color, and other times an insane array of colors reflected out over the lake, seeming to roll in like fog — almost eerie in a beautiful kind of way. (Btw — I happened to look up the word “eerie” upon writing this post and the first example sentence offered by Google was “An eerie green glow in the sky.” Cool.)