by: Miller Hyatt

Posted: Nov 16, 2025 / 02:15 AM EST

Updated: Nov 16, 2025 / 02:17 AM EST

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If you were on social media earlier this week, your feed was probably flooded with the same question: “Did you see the sky?”

It wasn’t a filter, and your eyes weren’t playing tricks on you. The answer is yes! We really saw the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis, right here in the CSRA.

This is an incredibly rare event for our latitude. Normally, you have to travel to places like Alaska, Iceland, or Norway to see this spectacular light show. So, how and why did it happen here?

It all comes down to a perfect (and very powerful) storm… on the sun.

This entire event started on the surface of our sun. The sun operates on an 11-year cycle, and we are currently approaching its “Solar Maximum.” This is a peak period of activity, meaning more sunspots and, crucially, more solar explosions.

A few days ago, the sun unleashed a massive explosion called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). Think of it as a solar-powered cannon blasting a cloud of charged particles and plasma into space. This one just happened to be aimed directly at Earth.

When that solar wind hit our planet, it slammed into our protective magnetic field, triggering what scientists call a “G4” or Severe Geomagnetic Storm.

Normally, our magnetic field funnels these solar particles toward the north and south poles. This excites gases in the atmosphere, creating the “auroral oval” that typically stays locked up near the arctic circle. The most common color is green, caused by the particles hitting oxygen at lower altitudes.

But this G4 storm was so powerful that it essentially overwhelmed the system. It shoved that auroral oval much farther south than usual, all the way down to us.

Because we are so far south, we weren’t looking up into the aurora; we were looking out toward the northern horizon. We were seeing the very tops of the auroral curtains.

The stunning pinks, purples, and deep reds we saw are characteristic of particles exciting nitrogen and high-altitude oxygen. We were seeing a part of the aurora that’s often invisible even to observers in the far north.

Many of you probably noticed that the colors looked much more vibrant in your photos than they did to your naked eye. This is totally normal!

Our eyes aren’t great at seeing faint color in the dark. But modern smartphone cameras, when held still, use a long-exposure setting. They can “soak in” that faint light for several seconds, revealing the incredible, rich colors that our eyes just can’t process.

This was a truly amazing and rare event. But the big question is: will we see it again?

The answer is maybe.

As long as we are near this Solar Maximum (which continues through 2025), the sun will continue to be active. This means the chance of another strong CME aimed at Earth is higher than it’s been in over a decade.

We can’t forecast solar storms like we do thunderstorms, but you can be sure the entire weather team will be watching the sun. It’s a fantastic reminder that our “local” weather is directly connected to the rest of our solar system.