was incredible where we live!  If I hadn’t been on Facebook, when I was, to see the local weatherman chatting about the sky, I may have missed it.  It was the strongest Aurora Borealis I’ve ever seen. Granted, I’ve only seen one other Northern Lights event and it was back in the dinosaur print photography days.  There are no photos to prove what I saw, then.

According to Bill, our local weatherman, A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field on Oct. 24th around 1837 UT (2:37 pm EDT). The impact strongly compressed our planet’s magnetosphere and may have exposed geosynchronous satellites to solar wind plasma. Mild to moderate geomagnetic storms are possible in the hours ahead as Earth’s magnetic field continues to reverberate from the hit.  Sky watchers in Scandinavia, Canada, and northern-tier US States should be alert for auroras, especially during the hours around local midnight.  This Aurora are visible down to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio so far.  You got that.   Right?

I chuckled when my friend asked if isn’t this what happened in the movie Frequency? Anybody tried the CB radio yet? 🙂  It definitely was very alien~esque feeling.
And what a gorgeous star filled night it was to watch the sky.  If it wasn’t for the smell of a recent skunk, it would have been perfect!

I have to give the photo credits to our daughter, Amanda.  She ripped my camera right out of my hands and sent me running for the tripod and a flashlight.  She assigned me Facebook update duty, too.  Not sure how I fell for that, but I did.  She did a great job! No photoshopping needed.

We did try to video the movement, in the sky, but I was using a little pocket video camera. The quality wasn’t enough to record anything.

If you are interested in seeing more, check out this quick 28 second time-lapse video from a guy just south of us.  It is amazing.

I need to learn how to do that…  Next time, I could probably use my good camera to do the videoing and make daughter run, for hers, for the prints….