Aurora Hunting

Today, I went on a road trip to find the Aurora Borealis.

For those of you in my area, you may have read in the papers that the Aurora was going to be particularly strong a few hours ago, due to a solar flare or something astronomical like that.

[I wanted to see this.]

A friend called me up and asked if I'd be willing to hop in his car and head towards some backwater, middle-of-nowhere country road so that we could see the sky without the interference of the city lights. Nothing sketchy about hanging out in the middle of the night in a pitch-black, back-country road right?

Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the Aurora, because the lights are caused by solar particles entering the earth's atmosphere. Emphasis on solar, which means the lights are paradoxically visible only during the daytime, when the sun is still up, but during the evening, where it's dark enough to view them.

[Instead, I got this.]

Even though I didn't get to see the Aurora, I still caught a rare view of the night sky that we don't get in the big cities, plus, I got to take a detour out of everyday life.