Vol. 93 No. 13 April 5, 2023
The Wonder Of It All
Photo credit Jennifer Vanderplas
The latter part of March proved to be a spectacular time in our night skies. The dazzling display of purple, pink, teal and green hues, usually relegated to our North, were seen night after night all across Canada and right here in the Pass. Large clouds of energetic and highly magnetized plasma erupting from the solar corona into space were disturbing and distorting our magnetosphere in a beautiful way. The amazing auroras are truly magic in the sky, with electrons and protons colliding with gases in our Earth’s upper atmosphere. The collisions produce tiny flashes that fill the sky with colourful light. There are billions of flashes occurring in sequence and so we see the aurora “dance” in the sky. That magnetic field is our last line of defense against such things as coronal mass ejections that come at us at speeds of 1,000 to 2,000 km per second. Jennifer Vanderplas, whose “Etched In Time Photos” are always first rate, spotted a facebook tip about an event on the evening of March 23rd and raced out to the Burmis Tree with son Asher to see if she could capture the moment. The result was a spectacular westward looking shot with the old limber pine sitting front and center. Jennifer says she took just one shot that night and when you’re good I guess that’s all it takes. No doubt that old Pinus flexilis has seen many auroral events in her 600plus years of standing up against the sky. There are several websites around the world that monitor and predict northern light events and right here in Alberta we have one of the most respected, known as Aurorawatch.ca. With them one can subscribe to email alerts as to the likelihood of an event on any given night.