Outside of hiking and traveling, astronomy and sharing the love of the cosmos with other people is one of my greatest passions. Unfortunately, when back-to-back hurricanes roll up the coast, and one of them makes landfall five miles from your house, stargazing gets tossed onto the backburner. The resulting stress tires you out and weakens your drive to grab the telescope and get back to normalcy in the midst of recovery.
Helene flooded major coastlines down the road from me, and Milton rolled through my town. Fortunately, my house sustained next to no damage, despite the downed trees, powerlines, fences, and crushed cars elsewhere in my neighborhood.
Infrastructure is still coming online. Gas stations are slowly getting fuel back, and I only waited for 20 minutes to fill my tank for the first time today, compared to the hours-long lines immediately in the aftermath. While I’m going on Day 4 without power, I’m using my portable solar panels to charge batteries and my larger solar generator, which has been running a minifridge for some of our food and drinks.
Cold drinks are a luxury right now.
Daytime charging also gives us lights and fans at night, so life is semi-normal, in some ways, though building up the discipline to get back to work-work is a whole other beast to conquer when stress is high all over town.
But a beautiful thing happened when I returned from evacuating to the opposite coast.
Around the same time that Hurricane Milton was bearing down on southwest Florida, the Sun also let out a solar flare. The resulting coronal mass ejection (CME) impacted Earth Thursday night. CME’s are responsible for the aurora as energized particles impact oxygen and nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere, streaming the red, blue, and green glows into sky.
It was sort of the perfect combination, in all honesty. A G4 geomagnetic storm flared up, and with the hurricane knocking out power throughout Bradenton, the skies were left darker than typical. I went outside…and there it was: a pinkish-reddish glow, faint to the eye, but there nonetheless, draped the sky behind the passing clouds. It was unmistakable: the aurora was visible from southwest Florida. It had happened in May as well, but city lights blocked out the glow from where I lived.
I took pictures on my phone, livestreamed to let other people know so they could see it as well, and received a flurry of pictures showing the aurora all around the local area in the comments.
Seeing the aurora was sort of the perfect way to return home from the storm that otherwise wrecked many places throughout southwest Florida, a peaceful reminder that nature is indifferent, and sometimes awesome coincidences happen exactly at the right time. As a nature enthusiast and astronomer at heart, I find that to be the real magic of the world, and a wonderful way to connect us to the universe that surrounds us all.
See you on the next adventure.
Alex Martin
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