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The La Crosse area was treated to a spectacular show of the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, thanks to a major solar flare on the sun a few days earlier.
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The aurora borealis lights up the western Michigan skies near Rockford, Mich., Sunday, Nov. 7, 2004. The display, with its constantly shifting patterns of light started around 10:00 PM and lasted into the early morning hours. Auroras occur when charged particles in the solar wind interact with gases in the earth's atmosphere.(AP Photo/The Grand Rapids Press, Dave Raczkowski)
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"It takes about two or three days riding the solar wind for the charged particles from the sun to get to Earth," said Robert Allen, director of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Planetarium.
"If the earth didn't have a magnetic field, the charged particles would just go over it," Allen said.
Instead, the charged particles move along the earth's magnetic field, making the celestial light show a common event in northern latitudes such as Alaska, Canada and Sweden.
This solar flare was large enough to make the northern lights visible much farther south than usual, Allen said.
"I've lived here for 35 years, and I've seen them like Sunday night only a handful of times," he said. "It was like art and science coming together."
But the weather wasn't expected to cooperate, even if the display was repeated overnight. Mostly cloudy conditions were predicted, said Dan Jones, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in La Crosse.
Linda McAlpine can be reached at (608) 791-8220 or lmcalpine@lacrossetribune.com.
