Aurora on display in North Attleboro

Perry, a ham-radio operator (W1GRD) , reports he was up around 2:30 a.m., and on the radio when he heard some unusual distortions in transmissions that made him think there might be some aurora lights up in the sky - so he went outside with his iPhone.

While I was able to detect faint whisps of pink visually, I needed the camera’s sensitivity in these ranges for the ‘real’ picture.

He adds that what he head was something called "auroral propagation," which sounds:

A little bit like music being played underwater, it burbles a bit and is wispy and faint but the signal can quickly strengthen or weaken. In certain conditions you can bounce radio signals off of the charged layers the aurora is creating in the atmosphere. As a bonus, the Perseids are in full swing and there were several nice ones zipping by as I was outside.

Unfortunately for hams and other folks trying to actually USE the radio waves, the coronal mass-ejection event (CME) that triggered the storm that brought us the aurora also shut down a significant portion of the radio spectrum to communication for quite some time.