I have to imagine however many diaries are recorded, um, 80% of them have to probably mention the Northern Lights. What a great phenomenon. I know people were mocking how many pictures of the Northern Lights people were just pasting all over their social media, but what an amazing thing to post on social media, right?
‘Kay, so here’s my personal one. So, my girlfriend is really in touch with weather-related matters. You know, like her, her favorite follow on social media is the former meteorologist for her local station, who left his position and went independent, and now she follows him closely. So she had a beat on this whole Northern Lights phenomenon.
So what we did on Friday is we drove down to the beach, got as far away from the beach house as we could along the lonely shores of Lake Michigan at around 10 P.M. And, initially, we looked and were like, “Are we seeing anything up there? I can’t really tell.” And then the lights began dancing, and it’s like “We are. This is it. It’s happening.” And it was amazing, it was beautiful, it was something we never thought we would be able to see here, especially the way we did. It was, it was a moment that you knew you were living.
You know, we went to Iceland and we didn’t see the Northern Lights. Granted, it’s because we went to Iceland in the summertime when the sun is up for 22 out of 24 hours a day, but the feeling was always, we probably need to go to the Arctic Circle to really get a good — and just pray that we, that we were treated to the Northern Lights at some point. And instead, it came to us randomly, out of nowhere, on account of this solar storm. And we could actually see them! It was not — I always thought if I could see them in Michigan, they’d be like the, you know, the Michigan version. The off-brand, lower Peninsula version of Northern Lights. But, um, it was glorious. It was spectacular!
And now, the one thing I’ll say, and this is a — and this is a good thing. They were not as spectacular as most photos would lead you to believe, if you’re someone who missed them. Which is not to say they weren’t spectacular, just not as spectacular. Because I remember — I don’t have a, like, a night, uh, night mode on my camera on my phone, but I did take down my camera-camera. But it was my girlfriend who took the first night-mode photo. We were looking at the northern lights and we were wowed and we were like, “Wow, this is great.” And then she took a photo on her camera, and we looked at it and we were like, “Whoa-kay, that’s spectacular.” It was almost like the invisible ink pen, when — you can write something down, it doesn’t show up and then you shine a light on it and there it is. That’s kinda what it felt like looking at the northern lights over the shores of Lake Michigan in the middle of the night. You could see the glory, anyway, and it was beautiful, it was all the things, and very surreal to, to actually see. But then when you took a photo with your camera, then it went from “Oh, that’s pretty nice,” to “Oh my God. The sky is neon. This is the greatest thing.”