On Monday night, he was able to check it off and has the photographs he took on the family farm, seven miles east of Menahga, where he farms with his dad Ron, to prove it. He also posted his images of the Northern Lights on Twitter.

“I’ve been trying to catch them for a long time and that was finally my opportunity,” he said.”I saw that there was going to be a solar storm, so I went out late in the evening just waiting for them. I first spotted them around 9:30 p.m., but most of my best pictures were taken between 11:30 p.m. and midnight. I was out there off and on. It was getting pretty chilly out there trying to chase them, so I had to take some breaks. It was close to 50 degrees, but it was so humid out there that everything was damp.”

He drove alone into a field where the bright farm yard light was no longer visible on his Polaris Ranger side by side and set the phone on top of its roof to stabilize the camera while getting a good view of the night sky.

“When I held the phone the pictures didn’t turn out well,” he said.

Schleper took the photos on his iPhone 12 Pro Max with three built-in cameras. “It has a night setting with the ability to set a really long shutter speed,” he said. “I took 10-second exposures and that enhanced the northern lights a lot. It was my first run using the night time camera mode. I was very impressed at how the photos turned out. The camera picked up the colors better than what I could see with my eyes. The horizon was really bright and green to the naked eye, but the camera really picked up on all the different flares, like the purple.”

He said there was not a cloud in the sky, which made capturing the northern lights possible. “And I got away from light pollution or they wouldn’t have turned out,” he said. “I took pictures towards the north and northeast. It was very surreal to finally have the opportunity to see them after wanting to for so long. It’s not very often they come this far south.”

Astrophotography ‘must-haves’

Barbra Wicks enjoys photography as a hobby. She works as an operations manager for ProvidaCare Minnesota, a home medical equipment supplier.

“Ever since I moved to Park Rapids in 2013, I’ve taken up landscape and night photography,” she said. “I love capturing the scenery our town has to offer. It’s just gorgeous here. Sunrises and sunsets are my favorite to photograph. I’d say my specialty is definitely landscape photography, but I do occasional portrait photography as well.”

Wicks used a Nikon D5500 camera paired with a Sigma 14-24mm lens, and a tripod with a remote shutter to photograph Monday night’s dancing waves of light.

“Tripods and remote shutters are a must for astrophotography,” she said.

Wicks has shot the northern lights several times since 2013.

“This was one of Minnesota’s stronger light shows and it lasted almost throughout that entire night. If I didn’t have to be up at 5 a.m. the next morning, I sure would’ve stayed up longer photographing them,” she said.

Manual settings make a huge difference in the overall outcome of the photo, Wicks added.

An unusual opportunity

Jacob Spender is a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Grand Forks. He said aurora borealis activity is monitored through a space weather prediction agency in Boulder, Colo.

“It has to do with geomagnetic storms and the interaction with our atmosphere,” he said. “We got a lot of people tagging the weather service from North Dakota and Minnesota. They were visible in most of North Dakota that had clear skies. In Grand Forks and the Red River Valley, it was a clear night. They were even bright enough to be seen in the city of Grand Forks.”

A lot of reports also came from the northern part of Minnesota. “They were visible in most of that region, too,” he said.

Spender headed out two miles north of Grand Forks around 11 p.m. “There were multiple windows for people to see them,” he said. “We had reports of people seeing them at 1 a.m., 5 a.m. and other time slots as well.”

Spender grew up in Wisconsin. He has only seen the northern lights one other time, in April of this year.

“They were on my bucket list for years,” he said. “In Wisconsin, I always had city lights around me. Getting out in the country. It was an eye-opening experience just to stand there for 30 minutes watching them dance in the sky. It was a beautiful sight to see. They were predominantly green with some hints of pink and purple in the higher parts and some hints of yellow. Alaska, near Fairbanks, is where they see the most color variations. In the lower 48 states, North Dakota is one of the primary areas to view the northern lights.”

He said some people report hearing sounds when viewing the northern lights and that phenomenon is being studied by scientists.

“I didn’t hear anything when I viewed them, though,” he said.

A northern lights show this early in the fall is rare.

“It can happen, but one this powerful, it was a sight to see,” he said. “The northern lights are more common in the winter months. That’s due to the tilt of the earth and the sun’s rays. Geomagnetic storms occur more often in late fall into winter and early spring.”