Apparently I’m the only one in the Twin Cities who didn’t see the aurora last night. I had to go to sleep early to drive to Iowa State for a graduation. Cool story though I found out that one of relatives who lives in Des Moines used to be a neighbor of former Rocket Matt Bullard.
Driving back from Ames, IA to Minneapolis last night did see the Northern Lights and was fortunately in rural Iowa where it was dark enough to see them well. Here is some video I shot.
For anyone seeing them, how rural do you have to be, and do you have to wait a good long while for your eyes to adjust? I'm in Oregon (I thought luckily), and the skies were pretty clear, but I couldn't totally get away from street lights, and we only saw a little dull greenish / purple glow on the northern horizon. I guess I can use MacPaint to create some aurora photos for social media though (like all y'all are doing).
I was very rural and it gets pretty dark in northern Iowa but they were bright enough I first noticed them driving in I-35 with my headlights on. As I was driving I noticed a weird greenish cloud that started to brighten. It took me a second to realize what they were. I pulled off the interstate about a half a mile and found a good spot that was dark. I heard from a lot of people in Minneapolis that they could see them even in the middle of the city.
I am in a pretty rural part of Idaho. I was able to get a good time lapse video at the tail end. The hour before this was better on a scale of many multitudes. It was other worldly, super glad I stayed up to watch it. Make sure you turn up the quality to 720, I pulled it directly from the GoPro app so it has been squashed in video quality.
