Related content: Super-size sunspots saunter across sun
LITTLE MOUNTAIN — Car after car drove onto the pull-out at the top of Emigration Canyon, switching off headlights. As soon as the vehicles were parked, people jumped out and stood in the icy darkness, gaping.
What they were admiring late Friday night and early Saturday morning was perhaps the most amazing spectacle of the aurora borealis, northern lights, seen in Utah in at least a decade. Residents viewed beams and colorful masses of light that glowed and shifted in the sky.
Many observers hurried outside after receiving e-mail from Hansen Planetarium's Patrick Wiggins, who noted that the lights were visible as far south as Kanab.
This time, the northern lights were misnamed. These weren't only to the north; they were the northern, eastern and northwestern lights. Curtains and streamers covered 120 degrees of the horizon and arched directly overhead.
The display was so bright that the lights were easily observable from residential neighborhoods of Salt Lake City. The show continued from around 9 p.m. until at least 2 a.m. Saturday, depending on the observer's location.
Cause of the excitement was a gigantic sunspot cluster, AR 9393, which ejected magnetically-charged plasma a few days ago. When the material struck Earth's upper atmosphere, it excited gas, causing it to glow like a neon light.
Thinking the bright moon and city-light pollution probably would preclude seeing any auroral activity caused by the sunspots, Chuck Hards still went outside his home in West Valley City for a look Friday night.
"I noticed a faint red glow in the northeast and then, within 10 seconds, like someone flipping a switch, FLASH! The fireworks started!" It looked as if the sky was on fire from the northern horizon to well past the zenith.
Hards and his wife watched while streamers, curtains, rays and amorphous glows lit up the sky. Red, green, gray, pink. "This was most certainly the best display I have ever seen," he wrote in an e-mail.
Paul Witte, Provo, said he received an e-mail from a friend in Riverton telling about "the best aurora ever." When he went outside, Witte was "completely taken aback."
He and his wife watched "large bands of blood-red and green light covering most of the sky. To the east I could also see red light behind the silhouette of the mountains."
In Orem, Chris Russell watched from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. and said it was "incredible the whole time!"
An Alpine couple, Dave and Christine Fox, were taking a walk in that town when the aurora began to flare. "At first I was almost alarmed, but then I saw the red and blue streams, and suddenly it hit me — aurora!" he wrote in an e-mail.
"It was suddenly a very dramatic sky, with huge blue streaks to the north and red streaks to the east, and the northeastern sky bright white. . . . Christine informed me that I was squeezing her hand too tight."
They admired the "most incredible show, with huge, bright streaks of blue and red, with patches of blue, red or white of varying intensity that covered nearly the entire northern half of the sky."
Sometimes a group of streaks would appear overhead like the sun shining through holes in a cloud.
"It was so dramatic," Fox wrote, "that Christine wondered aloud if this is what the Second Coming would be like!"
Rich Tenney and his wife were playing dominoes with some friends in Pleasant Grove when the Tenneys' older daughter said the whole sky had been pink earlier in the evening. Realizing it might have been an aurora, they rushed outside.
By then, about 12:30 a.m., the sky wasn't pink anymore but they saw "plenty of greenish auroral curtains" despite light pollution to the north from Salt Lake City.
When the Tenneys returned to their home in Lindon, Rich Tenney watched until 2 a.m., when he got tired. "It was still going strong," he wrote.
Hards said he feels that anyone who saw the display was blessed. "As non-denominationally as possible, I'd like to express my gratitude to the Creator," he wrote.
"And it struck me that perhaps, just perhaps, this is the reason we are here . . . to witness and appreciate the beauty and grand spectacle that is nature, the universe."
On the web:
Space.com: Largest sunspot in a decade erupts
E-mail: bau@desnews.com