Thursday night, October 10, my buddy Mike and I had been texting each other about the possibility of visible Aurora Borealis activity in our area. As the weather has been unusually cooperative lately – sunny and clear – conditions were promising that we might be able to see the Northern Lights. At about 8pm, I happened to see local aurora photos all over my Facebook feed. So Mike and I conspired to meet up to do some train photography…
2024 has been a busy year for solar flare activity; the sun is currently in a cycle of greater activity that includes coronal mass ejections that ultimately pelt the Earth’s magnetic fields with extra radiation that can result in the beautiful and haunting Aurora Borealis.
Mike and I had made an attempt to see the northern lights back in 2011 up at Ivywood Road in Saxonburg, also known as SX South on the Canadian National’s former Bessemer & Lake Erie mainline. While we didn’t see any auroras, we did get a neat night shot of Bessemer 908 coming around the curve into the interlocking plant.
So, Mike and I were on the same page and both suggested SX South as a meeting point. I got on the road about 9pm and soon found not only Mike set up as well as our mutual friend Brad. I remarked that I’d heard some radio chatter on the B&LE channel on the drive north, and Mike had seen reports that the southbound ore train was delayed.
Initially the sky looked simply “off” to the naked eye, and we had to rely on the computational power of our smartphones to be able more clearly see the phenomenon. Our earlier photos revealed a greenish “wave” to the north.
We chit-chatted as we shifted around, making photos here and there. I savored a cigarillo along with the cold brisk air, with the ballast crunching under our feet. Soon, a magenta tinge began to appear to the north east, and we continued our mission of scavenging pixels of the sky.
Two magical events occurred in quick succession… the signal popped up to a high green, and in a few minutes we started to realize that we could finally see the spectacular show with the naked eye. Curtains of red and green slowly washed across the sky. We remarked that the red and green sky nicely complemented the green and red signal.
Satisfied that I’d documented the area with my iPhone, I decided to take the drone out for some test shots in anticipation of the coming northbound empty ore train. At this point, we could see green and red all around us, even looking south. But in the usual way of the railroad, no other sign of our northbound. As the minutes ticked by, Brad became the sacrificial lamb and had to take off. And sure enough, as required by Murphy’s law, the hotbox detector at 12.8 at Culmerville announced the coming train over the radio 31 miles per hour. The light show was starting to settle down, but yet I was able to capture a good drone shot of Canadian National’s SD70M-2’s hustling 2700 feet of empty ore cars back to Conneaut for another load of taconite ore pellets. I banged off a number of short time exposures and hoped that something would come out. Fortunately, one accidentally well-timed image emerged, and we went home satisfied.
