Violet Sky

This was not one of my planned posts, but when you’ve decided to name your blog Violet Sky (after the lyrics from the Hole song) and the sky lights up pink, purple, and green, it’s probably a good topic to cover.

The northern lights, to me, have always seemed like something that is interesting conceptually but not interesting enough that I imagined myself chasing them down, or specifically traveling somewhere Nordic to find them. When I saw on the news that a massive solar storm was going to be hitting earth and causing the northern lights to be visible as far down as Oregon, I even found myself debating whether it was worth staying up late to see them, given that the window was supposed to start around 11 pm.

But 11 pm came around and I was still awake, so I gathered my husband and my daughter and left the house in my pajamas, figuring I’d spend a couple of minutes checking it out and then come back inside.

45 minutes later, I had learned how wrong I was to discount the aurora borealis. Absolutely gorgeous. Most of this was not visible with the naked eye, though you could see the streaks and shapes and faint hints of pin and green. But behind a cell phone camera, it was amazing.

I’ve posted these all over social media, and found myself thinking, “Is it overkill to post on my stories and on my feed and everywhere else?” One of my favorite things about having cell phone cameras as good as they are nowadays is the accessibility of capturing random points in your life and looking back on it – I have over a decade of photos backed up to Google, and walking through a random block of them is like transporting myself back to those moments. So while, yes, in this moment, probably everyone is getting a little sick of seeing so many aurora photos at the same time, later on I’ll be happy that I can remind myself of this great night, where I stood outside with my family and felt lucky to be witnessing the night sky.