Aurora Fredericalis
We are sitting around after dinner, phone rings, its Vera and Bob. “Where was that place we went to see the comet out in the countryside? We are trying to see the aurora.”
“Wait, are you already in the car? Where are you?” I thought they may be driving around looking for a dark field to park in.
“We’re right outside your house.”
The four of us end up in my car. Battery has 118 miles of range left, “We can definitely find a place to watch that’s much closer than that, but just in case, make sure I turn around if we get down to 60 miles of range!”
There is a long line of cars heading west, out of the suburbs, on route 28. “Are all these people looking for the aurora?” Bob asks. I laugh because I think that’s a little far-fetched. My wife navigates us to Little Seneca Lake, way out in Boyds. “There’s a road by the lake, it should be dark over the lake and it’s getting out of suburbia so maybe there are no street lamps.” As we drive out, the road runs out of street lights, and townhouses and mini malls are replaced by woods.
We pull on to the road next to the lake. Oddly enough there are some cars out here in the dark. A lot of cars. And people milling around, holding out there cameras and looking at the sky.
“I don’t think we’re the only ones with this idea,” my wife says.
It feels like we’ve arrived at a concert. Cars filled with more auroranauts keep coming and going on the road, while people walk single file between the parked cars and the traffic. My wife’s theory is that we can get a better view if we go into the woods away from the headlights. I tell her “I hiked in these woods with [my son] Benjamin but it wasn’t at night. I have no idea where the trail is or even where we are now compared to where we parked last time.”
We ask someone where the path into the woods is and she tell us “Honestly you’re better off just standing next to the road by the lake.” My wife holds her own phone camera up to the sky when we get out of the car. “Look at that!” she cries. There is a green glow on the screen. I look at the sky with my own eyes and it seems to be glowing a little. Maybe? Or is it just after images from car headlights flashing in my eyes. We decide to go find a darker place and try to get back to our car without getting run over. I wish I wasn’t wearing such dark clothing.
It’s harder to find farmland than I expected. We even pass some McMansions. “Look at that, way out here!” I complain. But we pass through more woods and the landscape changes.
Now we are at the edge of a field. One car is parked there already with people milling around. I think we spook them because when they see us, they get into the car and drive away. We are less than 20 miles from my house but it already feels a bit like alien territory. Haven’t seen any Trump signs yet though. In the dark it’s hard to tell the difference between a patch of No Man’s Land and someone’s driveway. I wonder if a farmer comes out asking us what the hell we are doing on his driveway, will my “Harris-Walz” bumper sticker make things worse for us?
We crunch around on a dirt driveway, me hoping that that’s not manure I’m walking in. The moon is out, which isn’t great, and oh yeah I hadn’t noticed that one street lamp across the street from where we parked. Vera is excitedly pointing to greens and pinks on the northern horizon. “Look, you can see them moving!” The glow doesn’t look much better to me than at the lake. Bob mentions that he’s a little color blind and doesn’t even see the colors on her phone screen. I put my arm around my wife partly because of the chill in the air but mostly because I can.
I’m not seeing much, but I hear a strange high-pitched yodeling. It almost sounds like a siren but I think it must be an animal. I don’t know how I can tell it is from far away, but that’s what it sounds like. Vera has walked further out into the field and it crosses my mind that if it is anything that is hungry, it will get her first.
We try another spot. The field is darker but the sky looks about the same. We decide to head home. The car is plunging through a dark tunnel of trees. My wife says we just have to turn left at the next major street and we’ll be going in the right direction, southeastward. I see an occasional pair of bright eyes crossing the road. “Will that be a traffic light or a stop sign?” It looks more like the road will peter out into a ditch before we find a real intersection.
The forest opens up a bit and now it looks like we are driving to the Moon, which is lighting the pavement in front of us. I tell my wife to take a picture, stopping the car to let her get the shot. We reach the turn off, and then I’m supposed to turn left but we all notice some cars to the right. Again people, phones, craned necks. I turn right and pull in to a spot killing my lights to avoid messing with people’s night vision but going extra slowly to avoid killing the people sky gazing in front of me.
This place has the same rock concert atmosphere as the last place, even though it is more like five or six cars instead of dozens and there is not a line of traffic on the road. People are looking out over a dark field. It’s after 9pm. The sky has gotten darker. Two women show my wife how to hold her knew i-phone still so that it takes a picture with a longer time-exposure.
A white-haired woman tells me that NOAA has a space weather website that predicts when the aurora will be brightest. My wife finds the website and asks me how many hours difference between GMT and our time. “I think maybe six hours? Or five?” I say. The woman’s husband says “It’s definitely five.” Later Bob says he had an English accent. I wonder what part of DC they live in.
Someone says that the prediction was for the aurora to hit later in the evening, but they saw it around 8. “That’s when my daughter saw it outside her house in Silver Spring,” Vera says. Maybe the prediction was a bit off. The white-haired woman says, “The space weather predictions are just done with models.” I can’t help myself and say “ALL predictions use a model.”
We try to figure out which way is north. In the other places we stopped I was able to follow the pointer stars in the Big Dipper to the North Star, but here I don’t see them. I point and say “Well that must be west because the Moon is setting there.” The woman points a little to the right of where I pointed and says, “The sun sets a little further on, over there.” “Oh, do you live here?” “We live about five minutes from here.” She points to a bump in the sillouette of the horizon and says “That’s Sugarloaf over there,” the isolated mountain north of our suburb. She is not what I was expecting from the locals. She mentions that she did see the aurora before – in Svalbard. “Did you see polar bears there?” I ask. “Plenty of them,” she says. After the Golden Compass, it actually seems strange to be seeing Northern Lights withOUT polar bears.
Bob wonders if we are seeing Aurora Borealis or Aurora Fredericalis, the glow of a small city north of Sugarloaf. He is getting cold and goes back into the car. I notice a round patch of purple-pink near the horizon. It really does seem brighter than it had before. Vera and my wife are pointing excitedly at their phones, where the lights on the screen are starting to look like the undulating stripes from the aurora pictures you see in magazines. I look back at the sky and I can see them there too. There are strangely straight bars too, and then a white column of light that seems to detach from the neighboring smudges. Everything is still very dim, but it is unmistakably different than the glow of a distant city.
I can’t see the lights move or change, but each time I look at them they look a little different. It’s definitely not Aurora Fredericalis anymore. My wife had been trying to plan a northern lights vacation since she heard about solar max a year ago. The logistics kept not working and she had given up. Then people were seeing it in the United States this past spring and she told me, “If you can’t see it with your own eyes and what we see in the pictures only exist in the camera, what’s the point of trying to see it in person?” When I mentioned that there was supposed to be another one this week, she had barely even responded.
Now that we are there, looking through the camera is better than she had expected. “I guess it feels more real when you’re freezing outside trying to find it,” she later said. But now I could see picture-postcard sheets of light dancing behind her with my own eyes. She is grinning from ear to ear.
Someone says “Now you can cross that off your bucket list,” but later that night when we go to bed, I say, “I wonder what they will look like NEXT time we go to see them.”
