Rainbow over Jay Mountain

It’s still rainbow season in these parts.   I saw one yesterday, while I walked to work, but didn’t get a good picture.  Early this morning, it was gray, cold and windy so Tim went out to climb a mountain.  While I sipped coffee at home, I saw this out the window.  I ran outside to stand under the electric wires we are burying later this month, so they wouldn’t hog the photo.

This is the photo I didn’t catch last night.  I was in bed when Tim came in from the hot tub to tell me he saw something wierd outside, which he thought might be the Northern Lights.  This has been a dream of mine and I have been prepared to travel to Iceland, Finland, Alaska to see them.  Instead I saw them from my bedroom window.  I decided not to try to get a photo because it would have interfered with my enjoyment of this first encounter.

I have followed the Alaska geophysical site for years and was recently told about the Spaceweather.com site, which is based upon the NOAA space weather prediction data. They have a subscription service you can use to be alerted of “solar activity”.   Northern light sitings can be predicted when there are significant solar flares and other magnetic disturbances.  All I know is I have never seen the Auroral map predictions as bright or as far south as yesterday.  There were sitings and photos in more than half of all U.S. states.

We saw a curtain of red, to the northwest, which moved across the sky.  I was a little skeptical since most pictures I have seen show blues and greens but when I checked it out this morning, I learned the red is quite unusual and appears with very strong storms.  Check your clocks.