I was about ready for bed last night when I got an exciting call from a friend: the Northern Lights are bright tonight! So I grabbed my wife and a couple of good friends, hopped in the truck, and blazed up north. The auroras were visible, the night relatively calm but cool. And while the sky the was lit to the north, it pretty much sat there and teased us for a while before settling down.

Don’t get me wrong…any Northern Lights are a treat. This one I’d hoped would be a little extra special because one of our friends who came along is from “the South” and I was hoping for a spectacular show for her. While we saw a lot of shooting stars, likely stragglers from the Orionid shower last week, the auroras didn’t really live up to any of my stories of past experiences. Bummer.

I take stargazing pretty seriously. I tend to measure and schedule things in 15 minute increments, and within one of those periods I can have the truck rolling with my standard stargazing setup:

– Camera equipment
– Folding camping chairs
– Jackets and gloves
– Cooler of water, Dew, or Red Bull from the fridge in the garage
– Speaker system for the iPod
– Inverter & extension cord to power ’em
– Maglite
– Sunflower seeds, jerky, etc.
– Can of spare fuel from the garage pump (in case we go crazy)
– GPS receiver, now that I finally have one

I have a standard set of stargazing music ready to go on the iPod, too. We stood outside the truck with the music going for a while last night, just looking at the amazingly clear view of the stars and exclaiming when a meteor would zip past. All was not lost. But I really hope for an opportunity to show Jenny and my other Southern friends what the Northern Lights can really be like here in North Dakota.