I was about to go to one of my most anticipated events of the year, the Image Printing Christmas party, when the call came in. It was my friend Chuck, calling with the news that the Northern Lights were in full swing. I already had my coat on, but the destination had changed: We were heading north!

As you can see, my favorite Northern Lights probability indicator was going crazy. It had good reason to. Below are some of the wild imagery Chuck and I brought back from the frozen tundra:

When we first got there, the sky had a lot of reds and yellows mixed in with the greens.

In the eastern sky, the auroras swept upward towards the zenith. You can make out the constellation Orion as well as the Pleiades in this shot…that should give you a sense of magnitude.

After a while the reds went away, but the lights took on more of a ripple effect for a while. This was taken facing east as well.

This is a goofy angle, but it does show a good example of the winding snake-like formation reaching up through the night sky. All the upswept lights merged in a big vortex over our heads!

Here’s the vortex. The light was moving so fast, the camera didn’t have time to absorb it. I pushed the camera to the limit and was able to get the shot, sorta. Because I had the sensitivity set so high, I also got a lot of other stars in the mix. But this is where all the lights were coming together.

This ribbon of light followed the Milky Way across the sky. It rippled too fast for the camera to do it justice; it takes a long exposure for the camera to truly capture what’s going on.

This was the most fantastic evening I’ve had in YEARS as far as the Northern Lights go. They were swirling, dancing, and rippling. It was just like all those nights I remember in the 1980’s, from the last solar maximum. For a year and a half now I’ve been lamenting that we’re in a solar minimum, now that I actually have a camera capable of astrophotography. Well, I’ll be dancing with joy as things start to ramp up and we get light shows like this in the future.