Timelapse: Aurora Over Lake Michigan

A still photo taken of the aurora over Lake Michigan. Credit and copyright: Shawn Malone/Lake Superior Photo.

According to photographer Shawn Malone form Michigan, the aurora this fall have already been “insane!”

“We had a very strong auroral event here on October 2nd and 9th on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Malone said via email. “and what you are seeing in this video is the interaction of the solar wind impacting the magnetosphere at millions of miles per hour, that interaction causing the northern lights.”

These nights the aurora “really lit up,” said Malone.

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And there could be more aurora coming soon to the northern skies: SpaceWeather.com is reporting that a coronal mass ejection propelled toward Earth by an M1-class eruption on October 13th is expected to hit our planet’s magnetic field on October. 15th. “Polar geomagnetic storms and high-latitude auroras are possible when the CME arrives,” says SpaceWeather.

Of course, not all aurora actually look like this to the human eye — you can read our article from earlier today about the reality of seeing aurorae with your eyes vs. a camera.

RADIANCE from LakeSuperiorPhoto on Vimeo.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/