Recent northern lights show didn't quite beat ENMU drones

Did you see the aurora borealis? I’m not sure this time.

I saw them on everyone’s Facebook feed but mine last Thursday night. So I took a drive on a dark country road to see what I could see.

Using my imagination, I could detect a faint glow above the horizon — or maybe it was the glow from the lights of a dairy or Cannon Air Force Base.

After I got back and saw a few more photos online and on the late news I went back out in the back yard and could see the magenta caste to the wispy clouds. It wasn’t doing a whole lot of shimmering for me, however.

In theory, I should be able to open the blinds on my home office and gaze out on the northern lights as I write this column. In real life, there’s a street light glaring through that window and a single round from a .22 caliber rifle didn’t seem like the neighborly solution.

They say when solar storms flare up, energy from those flares flings energy and small particles toward Earth. Those particles can then randomly travel along Earth’s magnetic field and interact with gases to cause a light show of green and red light that seems to shimmer, glow and slowly morph.

The show I saw Thursday wasn’t as good as the drone show that Eastern New Mexico University recently hosted for its homecoming pep rally, which celebrated the school’s 90th year. But it was more of a phenomenon, since we rarely get to see the aurora light up this far south.

I saw the northern lights one other time, also in the fall and even further south, near Hope, NM. My brother-in-law, my very young nephew and I were on a deer hunt on a ranch 40 or so miles from the nearest city lights. The trip is memorable not just for the night skies but for the great time I had with that little boy, who played Conan the Barbarian with a yucca stalk sword around our campfire until he finally ended up in the fire.

He finally wore himself out and we put him to bed in the tent and hung out around the fire as it slowly died to embers. After a bit I turned my backside to the glowing fire to warm it and gaze up at the Milky Way. As I did I noticed a glow on the skyline I first took to be the lights of Roswell. Soon I realized it was a few degrees off from the direction Roswell lights should be.

Then I could tell it was changing colors slowly and undulating along the hilltop. I told my brother-in-law I thought I was seeing the northern lights and he tried to talk me back into believing it was Roswell. He questioned if the northern lights could even be seen this far south. I said I thought it was possible, but pretty rare.

As we watched and the campfire waned, we both became pretty certain we were seeing something we might not see again.

Just looking upward and finding it there like early man would have was just a bit more special than hearing about it first on Facebook.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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