Northern Lights seen over CA Sunday night, and may soon be visible again
The aurora borealis were seen above Lake Sonoma, in Yountville, Mendocino County, and also in Yosemite.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Seeing the Northern Lights in California may not be a thing of the past.
Last May, people from all across California saw the aurora borealis.
Sunday night, the lights were again visible across the Northern Hemisphere and that includes areas of California -- although the geomagnetic storm was not quite as strong as what we saw in May.
Images sent to ABC7 News show the Northern Lights, or what is called aurora borealis above Yosemite's Half Dome. The stunning pictures were taken Sunday night.
But you didn't have to go to Yosemite to see this. The Northern Lights were also seen above Lake Sonoma, in Yountville, and in Mendocino County.
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"My mom was actually the one really watching it. 'Is there gonna be clouds? Is there gonna be smoke? Is there this or is there that?' She was really zoning in on it for me," said Kim Van Hoy. She took images on her cellphone from a hill in Ukiah. Van Hoy says that while the colors showed up on the phone, her eyes could see that there were things moving in the sky.
"Definitely something was happening like I said, a lot of the light you could really tell a difference when you look at the horizon," said Van Hoy.
"The sun goes through an 11-year cycle of peaks and troughs and right now we're at sort of the high point of it's activity. Earth's magnetosphere actually protects us from the onslaught of the charged particles that are coming at us and actually the reason we see aurora is because of that protective magnetic field," says Ryan Wyatt of the California Academy of Sciences.
Wyatt is senior director of the Morrison Planetarium and science visualization. He says predicting these Northern Lights events are challenging.
"The aurora activity is always tricky to predict because we're basically watching for solar storms that are coming right at us," said Wyatt.
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Gerald McKeegan of Chabot Space and Science Center says the geomagnetic storm is subsiding for the moment but there is a possibility that it strengthens again in the next 24 hours.
Photographer Marion Williams, who took a picture of the Northern Lights on his cellphone, and another one on his professional camera was alone most of Sunday night near Cave Rock on Lake Tahoe. Others who showed up thought they missed it and left.
"One couple did come up and they stayed for about 45 minutes and then they left and once they left, I looked to my left and saw the aurora spiking up and I almost called them back - was like, come back! I was like no, be kind of weird huh, so they left and I had the whole rock to myself at that point. It was really cool," said Williams.
Wyatt says that if you haven't seen one of these images yet, you still may have a chance in the coming months.
"As far as how long it's going to persist, I think we'll see at least another several months of activity and it won't just abruptly stop it will kind of go through the cycle and wane so there could be surprises as it goes out of it's period of maximum activity," he said.
Wyatt says the great thing about cellphone upgrades in recent years is that they are now able to capture colorful images with longer exposures that astronomers have been capturing on professional cameras for many years. He says our eyes are remarkable but there are limits to what they can see.
