Photographers enjoying rare aurora borealis light show
By Mike Lynch
At 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 11, whitish pillars of light rose into the sky over the barn at Donnelly’s Corners in Harrietstown. Rising from northern hardwood forests in Lake Clear, they glowed above the mountains.
In his Jeep, parked at the Upper St. Regis Lake boat launch, amateur photographer John Faltus slept beside his tripod and camera.
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An exhausted Faltus had spent most of the night hoping to capture the aurora borealis. At sunset, he hiked Panther Mountain near Tupper Lake. After, he drove north of Saranac Lake, stopping at Glenview in Harrietstown and then proceeded to Vermontville. But clouds covered the sky.
He considered returning home to his warm bed, but by 11 p.m. he took up watch again at Upper St. Regis Lake. With clouds continuing to hover, he took a nap in his Jeep, waking shortly after 3 a.m. With the clouds gone, he photographed greens, reds, and purple in the sky until dawn.
That was the second time that week that Faltus had witnessed the phenomenon. The previous Sunday evening, as he drove back from Old Forge, he enjoyed a show of red lights in the southwestern Adirondacks. That night, the sky was punctuated with a flash of lighting.
Such displays, each memorable and remarkable, are expected to keep rolling in 2025.
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But the week of Oct. 6 was extraordinary for aurora enthusiasts in the Adirondacks as the lights appeared three nights, more than some photographers see in a year in the Northeast.
The Monday after the lighting, Kurt Gardner, a professional photographer in Old Forge, nearly lost his bearings as his stomping grounds turned into a dreamscape—a kaleidoscope of colors from evening until a couple hours before dawn. He raced around capturing the sky over the Moose River, Old Forge Pond, Seventh Lake, Eighth Lake and Raquette Lake.
“The rays were very defined and very, very bright … the sky was pulsing,” Gardner said. “And, you know, there was a moment that I actually got dizzy.”
Standing alone on the Seventh Lake dock, a vertigo-like sensation overtook him as he looked to the sky.
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“Once you get storms like that, for me personally, that’s like the Super Bowl, right?” Gardner said. “I mean that was the Hail Mary pass, and I wanted to catch it in every spot.”
Solar maximum
About a week after the Adirondack auroras, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced that the sun had reached its solar maximum period. During this period, solar storms are more frequent than normal and so are northern lights.
In a fall 2024 interview, NOAA’S Space Weather Prediction Center forecaster Shawn Dahl said the lights will keep turning on. “We’re still in line for a ride with this solar cycle activity through this year, well into next year and maybe even in 2026,” Dahl said.
About every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles flip, resulting in colorful solar storms, according to NASA. We are currently roughly halfway through Solar Cycle 25, which started in December 2019.
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During the peak, sunspots and solar activity increases, causing more solar flares, coronal mass ejections and corona holes. These events break plasma, consisting of electrons and protons, from the sun.
The plasma then travels through space as solar wind that can penetrate Earth’s atmosphere at the north and south poles. When those electrically charged particles interact with oxygen and nitrogen gases, they create greens, reds, purples, blues and pinks that are commonly seen in the most northern and southern latitudes as auroras.
Solar Cycle 25 has been more active than its predecessor, according to scientists, but it isn’t necessarily unusual to have this much activity.
Some of the nights have been particularly noteworthy, including that of May 10-11, when the aurora reached the highest level of intensity, a G5 storm, for the first time since 2003. It was also “possibly among the strongest displays on record in the past 500 years,” according to NASA.
The lights could be seen as far south as Florida.
“That just points to how active this solar cycle has been and how much energy the sun is capable of releasing due to all the magnetic changes and things going on in this particular solar cycle,” Dahl said.
Aurora alerts
Photographer Carl Heilman II has been observing the northern lights since the 1960s, first seeing them in the middle of the night from his childhood home in Lancaster, Pa.
Since then, Heilman has frequently seen the auroras like many people: on the display of his camera (or smartphone), which are more adept at picking up colors.
One of his most memorable viewings occurred in the 1980s when he walked out the door of his Brant Lake home.
“The glow was all around,” he said. “It was just like the forest was on fire”
Back then, seeing the auroras in the Adirondacks was a different production. Heilman relied on television. Faulty reception signaled solar storms. Nowadays aurora chasers rely on apps that share data from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, Facebook groups and chats that can continue dusk until dawn.
Photographer Jeff Nadler, an administrator for the Aurora Hunters New York Facebook page, immerses himself, using modern technology to track auroras.
Nadler got hooked in March 2023. Initially he relied on NOAA’s KP index forecast, which rates the magnitude of geomagnetic storms on a scale up to nine.
“I would sit there on the shore of Great Sacandaga Lake for seven hours, and it never happened,” he said. “I didn’t know the KP forecast was really a stab in the dark.”
This is a common mistake among aurora chasers who rely so heavily on the KP Index, waiting for the forecast to hit a five or so to be able to see the lights in the Adirondack Park.
Nadler learned that the science of predicting auroras is nuanced. People need to pay attention to solar wind speeds and densities, the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field, and other factors. The info is all available from NOAA.
In 2024 alone, Nadler has captured about two dozen auroras, a big number for the Adirondack Park. During non-peak years, dedicated aurora chasers might see them a few times, if at all.
Dark skies
The Adirondacks are one of the prime spots to see auroras in the continental U.S. because of the lack of light pollution and relatively northern latitudes.
Recently, viewers have flocked to open spaces in the park. Johnathan Esper, a Lake Placid photographer who frequently disappears into the woods to shoot them, said he’s seen hundreds of people show up at the Batchellerville Bridge over the Great Sacandaga Lake in the southern Adirondacks on nights when auroras were forecasted.
Some of the best places are in the southern and central parts of the park where light pollution is nearly non-existent. Hamilton County is one of the least populated counties in the Northeast. Southwestern Essex County is equally as dark and a good spot to see them.
On the night of October 10, when Faltus was driving around looking for the lights in the northern part of the park, Olmstedville resident Amanda Bane cruised the dark roads of the interior Adirondacks.
That night the Indian Lake social worker drove her two-year-old daughter to Overlook Park in Newcomb which offers a dramatic view north across a field toward the distant High Peaks. She had seen the full solar eclipse there in April, but she didn’t see anything unusual that October night.
The drive back was quiet, but through the trees, pink and green colors emerged and when she arrived in her driveway, her home was backlit by the aurora. “Being able to see it was just unbelievable,” she said.
Top image: Northern lights over Seventh Lake in the southwestern Adirondacks. Photo by Kurt Gardner
Great article – THANKS!!