Have you seen the Aurora Borealis?

 

The Aurora Borealis (or Northern Lights) have been strong recently.  A couple of times there have been predictions of them in the DC area and I have tried to go see them without luck.  Last Thursday night was a super strong one and I happened to be in Shenandoah National Park. I watched them for a couple of hours and got some great pictures. Some friends of mine posted photos they took in Olney, so they were visible in Montgomery County, but, with all the light pollution we have around here I'm not so sure about Bethesda.

This one is from early in the evening. It started out as a pale green that spread across the sky, the reds came in later.

To my naked eyes, this looked a but like light pollution on high clouds, but a long exposure on the camera really brought out the color.  I highly suggest taking pictures. The night mode on your camera app does a decent job.  I used a full-frame mirrorless camera and all this pictures were 30 second exposures.  Later in the evening, I could see the reds spread across the whole sky and some pale green even without using my camera, it was incredible.

If you have missed them so far don't give up. the Northern Lights are caused by sunspot activity and they go through an eleven year cycle that is peaking over the next few months.  The aurora isn't visible every day, I use a couple of websites to keep track. Space Weather is the first one, usually the top paragraph is telling you the chance of a solar flare (this is what causes the aurora) hitting earth.  Look for G4 or G5 class flares if you want a chance of seeing them around here.  The second site I check is SolarHam, which is for amateur radio, but they have a page with the forecast and pictures that show how far south the aurora should be visible.