I arrived home late last Thursday night, around 9 p.m. after a long day of photo assignments for Essex Media Group. The only thing on my mind, at the moment, was eating something for dinner. But when I walked through the door, my wife Casey yelled from the couch “We can see the northern lights tonight?!” I was as shocked as she was to hear this news, but 10 seconds of scrolling through Instagram confirmed things. Each swipe revealed an array of red and green skies from Salem, Marblehead, Lynn, Swampscott and the list goes on.
“Should we venture out?” she said to me.
With a bit of hesitation, mainly because I just wanted to eat the leftover pizza in the fridge first, I grabbed my camera and a tripod and we headed for the car because when are we ever gonna get this chance again? Based on everything I saw on social media, it seemed like any view of the sky would do, but I knew I wanted something iconic in the foreground, something that would definitively show that the aurora borealis was visible here, on the North Shore. It HAD to be the light tower at Chandler Hovey Park.
It seemed like we were on the right track when we pulled up to the sea of cars lining the street up to the park and boy were we. We stepped out of the car and looked north and there they were, a shimmer in the sky ebbing and flowing, stretching from the horizon way above our heads. I’m somewhat red/green colorblind (yes, I can see Santa wears a red suit and that the grass is green) but the subtleties of the color in the sky were lost to my naked eye. Still, I knew something was there, and immediately upon looking through the back of my camera I let out a gasp. Streaks of red, green, blue, and purple danced across the back of the screen and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“I can’t believe I can live here and see THIS,” I thought to myself.
What followed was an hour of working the camera into different angles, highlighting the sky and showing off the beautiful landscape of Chandler Hovey Park. All the while fighting off the freezing wind that was whipping across the park, numbing my fingers and face.
Apart from the northern lights, the coolest part of the night was everyone else surrounding me. We were all here for the same thing, to stare up at the sky in wonderment. Rarely a moment would go by without hearing an “Oooooo” or “Ahhhhh” echo across the park. It was an incredible experience being able to share these moments with everyone else who ventured out into the cold.
