I don't know if any of you noticed Sunday night November 7, 2004, but as we were coming home from the movies and dinner with the kids, I saw what I had only guessed was either the Genesis Wave or the Nexus from Star Trek, or possibly the Northern Lights.

 

I grabbed the camera, and started taking pictures.  Naturally, all you could see was black since the camera was set to auto exposure.  I quickly looked up the proper exposure level using the "Perfect Exposure" book written by Jim Zuckerman as well as the Canon 20D camera manual, set the ISO to 200, the exposure to 1/30 and used a canon 16-35 f2.8 wide angle lens.  I set the shutter speed at 25 seconds and snapped it.  

 

These pictures were only set to a smaller file size for email purposes.  It was taken at 11:00pm.  The camera did all of the exposure compensation for me without having to use Photo Shop or any other software. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was amazed at how clear and constantly changing Aurora Borealis is.  I had never seen it before, nor did I ever expect to see it in Michigan.  There have been quite a few solar flares over the past several weeks which increased the chances of seeing it.

The following explanation of Northern lights is taken from www.northern-lights.no - Northern lights originate from our sun. During large explosions and flares, huge quantities of solar particles are thrown out of the sun and into deep space. These plasma clouds travel through space with speeds varying from 300 to 1000 kilometers per second.

But even with such speeds (over a million kilometer per hour), it takes these plasma clouds two to three days to reach our planet. When they are closing in on Earth, they are captured by Earth's magnetic field (the magnetosphere) and guided towards Earth's two magnetic poles; the geomagnetic south pole and the geomagnetic north pole.

On their way down towards the geomagnetic poles, the solar particles are stopped by Earth's atmosphere, which acts as an effective shield against these deadly particles.

When the solar particles are stopped by the atmosphere, they collide with the atmospheric gases present, and the collision energy between the solar particle and the gas molecule is emitted as a photon - a light particle. And when you have many such collisions, you have an aurora - lights that may seem to move across the sky.

In order for an observer to actually see the aurora with the naked eye, about a 100 million photons are required.

For more details on the science of Northern lights or "Aurora Borealis" see this site - http://www.northern-lights.no/