The view from a Deltaville Ballpark dugout Sunday night after the evening’s sell-out game crowd had left offered something unexpected for Deltaville Deltas assistant coach and photography enthusiast Stephen Blue. “I was set up to shoot the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. I had the camera set to shoot continuous images, 30 seconds long each in order to capture meteors flying through the sky,” Blue, a Deltaville resident, said. “Around 1 a.m. I started to notice in the images that the sky to the north was getting a pink hue on the horizon. Confused, I started checking my camera’s color balance settings, thinking something was off. I then started to be able to see the colors changing in the sky with my own eyes.”
Blue continued, “I hopped on my phone to check out NOAA’s aurora forecast, and sure enough there were already reports of northern lights visible down to Delaware and West Virginia. Over the next hour they became incredibly vibrant, peaking between 2 and 2:30 a.m., before they started to fade and the cloud front moved in more.
“This image is a 10-second exposure captured at 2:13 a.m. (I had to back down the exposure time because of how bright the sky became). Out of more than 200 images, this one was one of five that captured a small meteor streaking through the sky (just above the treeline between the light poles).”
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are a natural light display in the Earth’s sky, and are generally only seen in high-latitude regions — areas close to the Arctic. Auroras display dynamic patterns of brilliant lights that appear as curtains, rays, spirals, or dynamic flickers covering the entire sky. They are the result of disturbances in the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by the solar wind. It is extremely rare to see them as far south as Virginia.
