Upon returning to the Bizzo following a family funeral in Dickinson, I settled in and decided to check the arsenal of websites I use to attempt my aurora borealis predictions. Things looked promising, and I made a mental note to head out for a look-see after a while. Before long, however, I got a call from a friend who was already out and about: the Northern Lights were blazing!

When my best friend and I arrived on the scene, the colors were pretty faint and uniform. That gave me time to wander around the field in an attempt to find an angle that provided what I was looking for. The windmill didn’t want to cooperate, as its head was facing the wrong direction at first. A small breeze apparently corrected that later.

Things ramped up for a bit, painting a sharper wall of light across the northern sky. Northern Lights can take on many permutations; dancing spikes of light, cascading sheets, and sometimes winding bands of glowing green that snake across the sky. This happened to be the long band variety. After a while, things appeared to wane, and it was getting cold…so I decided to pack up the gear.

Apparently that’s what the sky was waiting for, because as soon as we began to drive away the intensity flared and we started to get some additional colors and spikes. I hadn’t made it far down the road, so I whipped around and bolted over to the previous position to grab a quick few shots. This time some reds began to make an appearance as well as the light began to dance more brightly.

Finally – some spikes of color began to appear amid the horizon’s green and blue aura! They were elusive and short-lived, but they were there. I spent a few more minutes in the cold but otherwise perfect night, and the sky began to settle. Hiking back to the truck for the night, I got the gear stowed and checked the numbers one more time.

The way things were looking, I figured that there was a chance that things would flare up again around 3am as they’re known to do. It was approaching midnight, however, and I wasn’t about to sit out in the cold and find out. The plan was to head home, check on things before bed, and make the call there. In this case I decided to go to bed instead of back out into the night, predicting that the skies were going to settle. It turned out to be the right call; things dropped off after that.

I have a link on my Northern Lights page (link in the upper right column) for each of the many sites I use to “throw in the hopper” and make the call on whether I figure chasing after Northern Lights is worthwhile. It’s a soft science at best. In this case, one particular model was accurate and another was not. In other cases, a different model will make the correct prediction. It really ends up coming down to gut instinct: trying to determine which numbers to trust. Yesterday’s solar wind blast was expected, but it was not expected to cause any auroras. One blip on one set of data is what made me suspicious, and it turned out to be the right call.

Since I’m a husband and Daddy these days, I can’t be bolting out of town every night in the hopes of getting a lucky encounter with the auroras, so I’m trying to see if I can get a better sense of when such a trip is worthwhile. Last night my instincts proved correct.