On Wednesday night, Alex Taalman set up two cameras near Long Beach to catch the light show.
“It was really, really beautiful,” he told CTV News. “Lighting up the sky more than the eye could ever pick up, and it was absolutely breathtaking.”
The northern lights are caused by charged particles from the sun that slam into the earth’s atmosphere at incredible speeds. The earth’s magnetic field protects us from these particles by redirecting them to the north and south poles.
We see the particles and the magnetic field swirling around with the gases in our atmosphere.
Part of why we got northern lights so far south is because the sun let out a couple of giant solar flares earlier in the week. It takes 2-3 days for the particles from the flares to reach earth.
