Surprise Northern Lights Show on Thanksgiving Eve

Around midnight, after thawing out the turkey and getting things ready for the big feast tomorrow morning, I heard Oook (the adorable dog I'm sitting for) barking in my bedroom. I walked over to see why and looked up to see the northern sky filled with the familiar bright green glow of the northern lights! So I quickly ran back to grab my camera, shoes, and a sweatshirt before running out on their deck. I didn't have my tripod with me so I had to improvise by tossing one of my sweatshirts over the snow-covered railing on the deck.

It was the first big northern lights show I have seen this winter. We have been at a solar minimum for a couple of years now, which prevents us from seeing too many major aurora events. That makes nights like this even more incredible. The lights looked like curtains of green rippling back and forth across the northern horizon... even with occasional red fringes. The lights are caused when excited molecules, like oxygen and nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere, become excited and go to a higher energy state, and then fall back to a lower energy, emitting light as they do so.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the evening... with the peak in the show around midnight and 1:20 AM.

This one is of the constellation Orion (the hunter)... you can see the 3 stars that make up his belt, and the fainter 3 stars that are his sword... and then his body is the 4 bright corner stars.  The 2nd photo below outlines it.  The sky is pink here because of the light pollution from downtown Fairbanks.

Here's the big dipper with part of the aurora...

And one last Northern Lights photo...