Recently, our own star entered a period called the solar maximum. During solar maximum, the magnetic poles of the sun flip, we see more sunspots, and huge coronal mass ejections (CME) erupt from the sun’s surface. If a CME targets Earth, the possibility of seeing the Northern Lights in the middle latitudes increases.
Even so, I had always thought of Aurora Borealis as exclusive to the northern realms of the Arctic Circle. So when our daughter called us back in April, from Memphis of all places, to tell us she was seeing the Northern Lights, we were stunned. “You’ve got to use your phone to really see them!” she exclaimed.
Immediately outside, we could see a definite, overpowering pink glow. It was faint, but perceptible, to the naked eye. But she was right, the sensitivity of even a smartphone camera greatly amplified what was manifesting in the sky. And in an instant, I was overcome with a feeling of joy and awe. The aurora was breathtakingly beautiful. Awakened from decades of sleep, I felt a long lost sense of wonder. I had never seen anything like this. I loved the way the stars shone through the colors of the light blanket that draped the Earth.
Seeing the aurora brought to mind the strongest memories of my childhood. Reliving them in little movies in my mind, I thought about times like Christmas mornings. Or like the time when I burst through a door into a grand, sunken courtyard, and I was instantly awestruck at the juxtaposition of nature and architecture. Another was when our little family troupe scampered up a hewn stone staircase to find ourselves atop a great stone arch in eastern Kentucky. And my favorite one was being blasted by a warm, salty, offshore breeze, at the top of a dune, as I gazed at the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
I think of wonder as an encounter with something so outside of our understanding that it enraptures our senses, engages our mind, and enthralls our spirit. For me, wonder was a sensation that drove me; I wanted to wonder, and wanting wonder fueled my wanderlust.
Wither wonder? I think that God gave people this ability to wonder as a key to unlock the world to find Him behind it. I believe it is a component of the childlike faith we hear Jesus talking about. The Lord said, “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mark 10:15).
At our point in history, we can explain much of the phenomena in the natural world. Charged particles borne by solar wind interact with and excite gasses in our high atmosphere, causing them to emit light like neon bulbs. That explanation of auroras satisfies—until we ask how all the stupendous wonder of the Universe came to be.
Everything in the sky, especially at night, is jaw-droppingly beautiful: stars in their constellations, comets that grace our view, colored planets that only grow in glory as we zoom in with telescopes, and a beckoning moon . Twilight is magic as evening dims and the stars, one by one, pop into view. All this created by the Master Architect, God Himself.
What about the Big Bang? What about billions of lightyears and an equal number of years? Our rational abilities are supposed to conclude that blind impersonal forces do not create spellbinding beauty. This is the work of God.
And it is the work of God to build into humans the ability to wonder; for that matter, to laugh, to cry, to mourn, to love, to sing, to create. In the Creation account, Genesis quotes God saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26). What He did in making people in His image dwarfs all this grand celestial beauty.
I know not everyone believes in God. But there is an eternal, supreme Being who created the fantastic biosphere called the Earth in which we live, with billions of beings inhabiting it, orbiting in a space of innumerable stars like ours. Take all that in—it ought to be your life’s pursuit to find Him, know Him, and love Him. The Apostle Paul said in an address to the Athenians, “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26-27). He knows your heart, your thoughts, your words. If you seek Him, you will find Him.
Exposures for the first two images were for 15 seconds at f/8 at ISO 1600 (of course, camera on a tripod). However, this was my first attempt to photograph the Northern Lights. It would have been better to shoot them for under 4 seconds at f/2.8 at ISO 3200. A shorter exposure would give a crisper rendering of the aurora; my exposures of 15 seconds gave the aurora time to move and blur a bit. Also, next time I do this is I will stack multiple frames of the foreground to reduce the effects of noise. Nevertheless, I am thankful for the pictures I got, and that it was 50°F up on the mountain instead of -20°F as it would be above the Arctic Circle.
The third photo was exposed for 8 seconds, f/2.8, and ISO 3200 a year later in November 2025. This time mountains obstructed my view of the horizon, but I love the reflection of auroral light in the water.
