As the dark season begins, more light

It’s November in Fairbanks, when the sun reminds you of where on the globe you’re leaving the snowy imprint of your boots.

Our favorite star now drops beneath the mountains about 3:30 p.m. That’s one hour earlier than at the beginning of the month. Two if you count the time change that slingshots us, ready or not, into winter.

We remember now that we are tropical animals, built to survive only in a narrow band around the equator without nylon body wraps stuffed with feathers of birds that flew south two months ago.

Nights in these parts are now twice as long as the days.

But sometimes, if we pause in the scurry between boxes warmed by burned diesel, these sub-Arctic polar nights show us more than the usual pallet of stars against an inky sky.

Last Tuesday was an example.

A few hours before sunrise, on a drive to a local high school, the sophomore neighbor noticed parallel light beams sticking straight up in the sky. It was as if people were standing at different intersections pointing lasers up at the moon.

I had seen light pillars before in Fairbanks, but not that vivid. Looking back in the rearview mirror while idling in the drop-off line, I could see a flurry of diamond dust in the flash of the car headlights behind me.

Those crystals — invisible most of the time — fall from a clear sky and don’t seem to accumulate on the ground.

In this space in 2020, I wrote about ice pillars: Ice crystals sometimes take on flat, hexagonal shapes.

Those wafers flutter down like falling leaves, allowing light to reflect off their flat undersides. This collective reflection sometimes appears as a beam above or below any bright light source — the sun, the moon, streetlights or car headlights.

Much later during that 24-hour period, after the sun had completed its weakening arc over the Alaska Range that day, darkness returned.

Tipped-off eyes in Alaska and across North America were then looking upward. Experts had predicted the strongest solar storm of 2025, due to three eruptions on the surface of the sun then barreling toward Earth and its protective, reactive magnetic shield.

Good luck. The skies were clear above this northern outpost that night. The aurora, many nights visible as a faint halo over the northern cap of the globe, appeared even through our south-facing windows. That meant it was overhead in northern U.S. states like Montana and North Dakota. People in Mexico saw the northern lights.

Not only that, the solar storm manifested a rare red aurora. I can remember seeing only one similar display in my 40 years of living here.

In review: Green auroras occur at about 60 miles above Earth. Red auroras are much higher, from about 200 to 300 miles up, which allows people closer to the equator to see them. An important gas remaining at that altitude is oxygen; electrons that excite the oxygen atoms there produce red light.

I was not brave that night. Instead of bundling up and embracing the subzero air to see the aurora, I stepped on my porch and snapped a few photos with my cellphone camera. My wife noted that the camera enhanced the red.

Many other people, however, ventured out to drink in the rare event. Among them was my morning rider, high-school sophomore Nora Carlson. During the next morning’s drive, she texted me her picture of the red aurora.

Ned Rozell is a science writer with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.