Locals view painted sky during rare Northern Lights moment

What better place to capture the colorful hues emitted by the aurora borealis than right here in Aurora. Wow. What a display!
I joined the multitudes of novice stargazers venturing out into the night air last week to look up and catch a rare glimpse of a phenomenon commonly known as the Northern Lights. I’ve heard about it, read about it and viewed pictures over the years, but until last week had never seen it in person.
I’m guessing I’m not alone, which helped explain why there were so many cars out on the rural roads of Hamilton County last Tuesday evening. We don’t have a lot of “light pollution” here in rural Nebraska, as compared to city folks, but Paula and I still wanted to take in this rare visual unobstructed by street lights so we headed out a few miles north of town.
I knew something was different right away, as there was a huge cloud of dust along 15 Road, at 8 p.m. on a weeknight. When we topped a hill we saw approximately 20 vehicles on the gravel road, and many more sets of headlights when looking out across the landscape. Word spread fast that this was a sight worth seeing.
Out there under a streaked Nebraska sky, the universe felt a little closer, and our county felt a little more connected. Not a bad payoff for a Tuesday night drive.
When we found a spot and the dust had settled, the view with the naked idea was interesting, but not nearly as spectacular as the image captured on our cell phones. That seemed curious to me, but the more I read up on Mother Nature’s version of aurora, the better I understood the scientific wonder of it all.
The aurora borealis, I later learned, was caused by a severe geomagnetic storm that emitted from the sun and hit planet Earth for a couple of consecutive nights last week. The storm was triggered by three coronal mass ejections, which are eruptions of solar material and magnetic fields from the sun, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. This visual phenomenon occurs at the peak of the sun’s 11-year cycle.
Mother Earth just happened to be in a spot in its rotation around the sun to get hit by the mass ejections. And we here in Hamilton County just happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch a rare glimpse during a solar cycle at its peak.
By some accounts, the Northern Lights could be seen that night all across Nebraska and as far south as Texas, though the colors were reportedly more vivid in some spots than others. The lights eventually softened and slipped away, but the feeling lingered, a reminder that sometimes the universe invites everyone to just look up.
And maybe that’s what made the whole thing feel so special. For all the science behind it, the aurora wasn’t really about charged particles or solar cycles, it was about neighbors standing on gravel roads, or just looking out their back doors, sharing a once-in-a-decade moment.
Turns out, one of the best places to watch an aurora really is Aurora.
-- Kurt Johnson