The Northern Lights Made a Rare Appearance Here in New England Last night the conditions were good for potentially seeing the Northern Lights here in New England. So, on the night of 10 May 2024, we ventured out in the late evening and luckily got to see some amazing sights between 9:30 PM and 12:30 AM from a variety of locations around our town. Prior to heading out we consulted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/) to check the forecast to find out if the conditions were actually good for seeing the Northern Lights in our area – since they’re the authoritative source for solar and space environment data. We also checked our “Sky Live”, “Moon Calendar” and “Lumnos” apps to see what the sky conditions were, the phase of the moon, and the location of the moon in the night sky – and the viewing conditions were excellent. The only odd thing we found was that our cameras “saw” the lights (which are caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with the Earth’s electromagnetic field) much better than our eyes. So, we had to shoot lots of photos and then see what showed up on our cameras. Needless to say, we were surprised many times because the faint colors and striations that we saw in the sky were much brighter and more pronounced in the images that our cameras captured. Here's a great write-up by Ewen Bell explaining why this occurs: "Why Auroras Look Different on The Camera" The gallery below shows photos of the Northern Lights that appeared in our town’s skies that night: (click on any photo to start the slideshow)
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