After the Northern Lights occurred in May, I began following NOAA’s Aurora Dashboard website to see when the Aurora Borealis would next be visible from Acton. Conditions seemed favorable for Thursday Oct 10th.
Initially I took photos in my neighborhood, but the street is almost entirely tree covered and the only direction without trees has lights. I arrived at NARA Park at about 9:25 p.m. and the sky was a light green color near the pond.
Next, we drove up to the parking lot near the amphitheater, where there were about a dozen other cars of aurora-watchers. It was just before 10 p.m. and it was getting cold, so we contemplated leaving. After warming up in the car for a few minutes, I stepped outside again and noticed a distinct pinkness to the sky and began taking photos (with Night Sight setting and 6 second exposure).
The colors got more and more brilliant. While your eyes can’t see the full beauty without the benefit of the cell phone camera, it still felt magical to see.
Note from the editors: Franny Osman contributes a video that she took around eleven p.m. on October 10 from Half Moon Hill in Acton. She notes that the video is more realistically subtle than still cellphone photographs of the same scene. Osman also heard rave reviews from people who observed the Aurora Borealis at 7:30 that night and shares a photograph below from Hannah Bloch.
Osman heard from another Acton resident that they hiked up North Road trail on Mount Wachusett to observe the view from the benches part way up. The resident was accompanied by her son who had driven three hours down from Vermont, where it was cloudy, for the experience. The son, who is colorblind, said that the display was colorful enough that he could still see it and found it no less awe-inspiring than others did. He noted that the view of the Aurora Borealis at 7:30, as he had been driving south on the highway, was spectacular and as good as he had seen in Norway. The two had thought they would be alone for the night hike but found parked cars from other skywatchers spilling out of the North Road parking lot and down the dirt road.
Sandy Roschelle lives in northeast Acton and enjoys observing and photographing nature.