May 11th, 2024: 0100-0300 EST
Music:
“Le Cygne” - Camille Saint-Saëns
The first time I ever saw the aurora borealis, Jane and I were standing on a windswept peninsula outside of Reykjavik, sleepy and exhausted after a breakneck several days’ trip in Iceland, in March 2015. The second time I saw the aurora borealis… I rolled over in bed and looked outside on a Saturday night. In my bedroom. In May. In Massachusetts. I spent the next two hours watching the skies, testing shutter speeds, and eventually, carefully figuring out how to balance the legs of a tripod on my windowsill, my desk chair, and a soft mattress so that I could shoot a timelapse. Meanwhile, one of the strongest geomagnetic storms in living memory danced across the night sky over much of the North American continent. Truly a special, once-in-a-lifetime kind of event - well worth my sleepyhead appearance the following morning, and Jane’s disbelief when I showed her the evidentiary footage.