Made arrangements to meet a couple of fellow aurora chasers out at Chena Lakes on a Saturday night when it was -21F. Â After my last adventure of scaring myself when I went out there alone, I decided the company of strangers would be better than being out alone. Â Also went to a new location, the second parking area of Chena Lakes. This turned out to be a great viewing spot too. The lights danced for us over and over and finally around 2:30am I was too tired to stay any longer so I decided to leave.
Since the other two people I had met were planning on staying to keep watching and taking photographers and headlights will make one loose their night vision I decided to try to move my car, without my headlights or even the running lights on, to the other side of the parking lot to let it warm up. Â Turns out, even in an empty parking lot there are things that can be crashed into, snow berms are the worst of them when it’s -20 since they are frozen solid and hard. Â I was not going fast, maybe 10-12mph when I very slowly and quite accidentally crashed my car into one of them and heard a massive CRUNCH. Â My friends turned from where they were watching the lights to check on me: “I’m fine!” I yelled out to my new friends. Â Little did I know how much I had broken my car. Â I got home around 3am and crawled into bed, not even thinking any more about the damage to the car….
It was not until the next day where I realized just how badly the front of my vehicle was damaged. Â The entire “under the bumper” plastic thing was cracked. I noticed it when I heard it dragging as I stopped at the Co-Op Market before heading to dance class. Â For some reason I did not have duct tape in my car, but I found a set of old broken earphones that were in my car console and used that to tie the breaking plastic pieces back together. Â A picture is below for your entertainment.
I have discovered in processing my pictures that my ISO was far too low.  Most were taken at ISO 1000 and though they looked good on my lcd screen on the camera that even with corrections via irfanview I’m not able to bring out the detail I would like.  I started with 107 images but I only ended up with about 20 that were good enough to post with some editing.
Also I’ve attached a couple of my favorites of the aurora from that night, the full album of them is here
