Nebraskans search out rare northern light display

The northern lights were visible the nights of May 10-11. 2-24 as far south as near the Nebraska-Kansas border. (Courtesy of Catherine Pond)

LINCOLN — Nebraskans took to the country roads and other dark places on Friday and Saturday nights in hopes of capturing a rare display of the northern lights visible much farther south than normal.

The stream of traffic Saturday night from Lincoln northward to Branched Oak Lake reminded some of the final scene of “Field of Dreams,” which pictured a solid line of headlights heading to a baseball field fashioned in an Iowa cornfield.

“I was awestruck,” said Catherine Pond, the marketing specialist for the National Willa Cather Center, who captured several images of spectacular red, green and yellow lights behind sites in and around Red Cloud associated with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 

Former Lincoln Journal-Star reporter Al Laukaitis said he didn’t see much at midnight on Friday night from his acreage southeast of Lincoln, but upon returning at 2 a.m., the sky “just popped.”

“Oh, my God, I started seeing this green hue. I thought, ‘It’s happening,” he said. “I was just mesmerized.”

Northern lights seen near Wagon Train Lake, southeast of Lincoln, early on May 11, 2024. (Courtesy of Al Laukaitis)

Laukaitis, as well as Pond, said the colors were much more vivid on the iPhone pictures they took than to the naked eye.

According to the space weather prediction center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the light show was visible to the naked eye as far south as Virginia, Missouri, Colorado and Northern California on Friday night into early Saturday morning.

The show in the Lincoln and Red Cloud areas were reportedly less spectacular on Saturday night into Sunday morning as clouds obscured some of the views.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center projected that the aurora on Sunday night will be most visible north of the U.S-Canada border. 

Pond said she’s obsessed with weather and often will seek out photographs after a thunderstorm or tornado, but she had always hoped to capture the aurora borealis in action.

Red Cloud and the 612-acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie south of town, she said, are ideal places to stargaze because of its rural location, far from any large city, on the Kansas-Nebraska border in south-central Nebraska.

“Out here … the big sky. There’s nothing like it,” said Pond, whose normal residence is amid the well-forested hills of Kentucky.

Laukaitis said he was surprised to see as much as he did from his rural home southeast of Lincoln near Wagon Train Lake. The city lights usually obscure the night-time sky in that northerly direction, he said.

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