By David Fleet
dfleet@mihomepaper.com
Laingsburg — The sun is currently rather rambunctious and that activity has been on display.
The Northern Lights or aurora borealis, which are typically reserved for areas nearer the poles has dipped farther south much to the pleasure and curiosity of those which happen to be night sky gazers.
Kevin Kacan, is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, White Lake Mich.
“On Thursday and Friday (Oct. 10-11) there was a strong geomagnetic storm that was on the high-end of the scale that made the Northern Lights more visual farther south, expanding the viewing scale,” he said. “On a scale of nine it’s the second highest. The lights were at the peak of the solar cycles, which makes them more frequent.”
The lights were not just in southeastern Michigan either, he said.
“Some were reported in Ohio too,” he said.
According to the Michigan-Algonquin tribe, they believed that the creator lit a celestial fire to let his people know that even though he was far away, he was still thinking of them. The aurora, that Native American culture said, was a reflection of that flame.
Dr. Dustin Scriven headed north of Lansing to witness the aurora borealis .
“We saw it here (in southeastern Michigan) because there was a strong coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun on Oct. 8 which was very strong,” said Scriven, a 2011 Brandon High School graduate who earned a Bachelor of Science in astrophysics from Michigan State University and recently a doctorate degree in physics at Texas A&M.
“This CME emitted particles from the surface of the sun which were directed at the earth,” he said.  “The sun is currently in a maximum of its 11-year activity cycle. This CME was the largest CME so far in the current cycle.”