Skywatchers in Alaska have treated to an auroral grandeur on Valentine’s Day thanks to a well-timed plasma explosion from the sun, with the brilliance of the display surprising even seasoned aurora chasers.
Glancing polar lights have long fascinated Vincent Ledvina. At the age of 16, a Ph.D. student in space physics took his first picture of the aurora. According to his website, he has been infatuated with the thrill of chasing the aurora ever since. He eventually moved from Minnesota to Fairbanks, Alaska, to study the physics of the aurora borealis. Alaska, the northernmost state in the United States, straddles the polar circle and provides the best lighting for viewing auroras. Ledvina has been taking full advantage of it.
The photo gallery on his website and Twitter accounts are overflowing with stunning images of the aurora borealis. However, the photographer acknowledged that the auroras he witnessed on Valentine’s Day this year were out of the ordinary in a series of tweets that were as exhilarating as the particles in the atmosphere above Ledvina’s head.
Ledvina tweeted, “Everything about tonight was insane,” as his Valentine’s Day night of viewing the aurora came to an end. One of the best, if not the best, nights of aurora I’ve ever experienced. It never stopped, we had substorm after substorm. He referred to the experience as “straight-up magic” in another tweet (opens in a new tab). He confessed that he had never seen such intense shades of red in an aurora in all his years of aurora chasing, accompanied by an image of a shimmering ribbon of green and purplish glow suspended above the winter landscape.
Alaska’s beautiful view of auroras.
Ledvina later explained to a press article in an email interview that auroras only show red colors when the density of solar wind particles in Earth’s atmosphere is extremely high.”The reds were spectacular because the solar wind density was very high,” Ledvina wrote. I’ve noticed a correlation between the red hues and high-density values. Additionally, as a sort of recovery mode, the aurora will typically “pop” only once per night before subsiding and evolving into a pulsating aurora. Even though I thought the show was over last night, I kept seeing more aurora from the eastern and western horizons just as I thought the show was over.”That was amazing. SUPERIOR substorm. There are no other words to describe how cool the entire sky glows. Wow!!!!” Ledvina stated in a subsequent post. Chase the aurora is not for the faint of heart. Ledvina had to endure temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 26 degrees Celsius) to capture the stunning images.
He watched the spectacle until his camera batteries died at 2 a.m. from a remote area of permanently frozen land 15 miles from Fairbanks. He admitted, however, that he continued to observe the gyrating lights for an additional two hours after leaving the location. Ledvina uses a Sony mirrorless camera a7 IV and a wide-angle, wide-aperture lens “to let in as much light as possible” to photograph the aurora.
According to Ledvina’s writing, “I also have my iPhone 14, which can do a pretty good job at capturing the aurora when it’s bright enough.” I was doing time-lapses with the Sony, so these are just frames taken from sequences of about 800 photos.”On Saturday, February 11, a powerful X-class solar flare and a burst of magnetized plasma, also known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), erupted from the sun, delivering the magical night.
The strongest type of solar radiation burst, the X-flare, briefly affected Earth immediately after it occurred, disrupting radio communications in South America for a short time. The CME particles took nearly three days to reach our planet because they travel through space at a much slower rate. Since solar activity is what causes the northern lights, there is less of a chance of a full-blown auroral storm during solar maximum than during solar minimum.
Even though the northern lights will still be visible at night before the return of solar maximum in 2025, Finding clear skies is the real challenge. Because of Earth’s tilt about the sun, the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind are in sync, so displays of the northern lights typically peak between September and March.
When you combine this with the increased likelihood of clear skies in Alaska in the spring, March will likely be the best month to see the northern lights at an inland location.
