Upcoming Mountain Bike Race
I was staying in a rental property with some of the mountain bike team. I had just golfed at the Conzemius Open (Z-Open) in Hastings during the day. After dinner, I drove back north to be with the team to help out with coaching the next day. The room we stayed in (near Ruttger's Bay Lake Resort) happened to have a nice view to the north. The solar wind magnetic field was becoming larger, but it pointed more north, and given the string of months with little in the way of nighttime geomagnetic disturbances, I wasn't planning on seeing auroras. In fact, we had gone out on the deck to look at the stars a bit, but the northern horizon was dark. We had to be up early, so we were in bed just after 10:00 PM.
At around 3:30, I awoke like I normally do. Since the solar wind magnetic field had become slightly elevated in the evening, I decided to look at solar wind data. To my amazement, Bz had dropped to near -20 nT and had been negative for almost an hour. It had returned to a slightly north orientation, but the hour of negative teens was enough to get the auroras going.
My immediate challenge was to get up without waking anyone else. I walked as quietly as I could to the door and opened it. Nobody awoke. Now on the deck, I could take a look for auroras. There were a few clouds, and the few trees to the north were illuminated by a street light on the south side of our building. This made it difficult to identify without a camera, but I could see a glow. The iPhone picture below confirmed it. I went back inside and occasionally looked at a couple webcams to see if any substorms appeared imminent, but there were none. The auroras were close to the horizon, and there were no substorms that I'm aware of.
