Caribou Lake Aurora 001

On Monday the solar wind created some nice auroras. It was an absolute still night so both the aurora and stars were reflected in the waters of Caribou Lake.

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Caribou Lake Aurora 002

The Big Dipper was perfectly reflected.

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Caribou Lake Aurora 003

According to Spaceweather.com Earth was also passing through debris from the comet Encke. Rock and ice fragments disintegrated causing beautiful meteorites to race across the sky. In about one hour I saw half a dozen or more. In the right hand corner of this photo one of the rock fragments is moving vertically. I have never witnessed a meteorite quite like this one. It was like a ball of different colors of red and orange and looked like molting lava. It disintegrated directly overhead and then a pack of wolves started howling from a nearby ridge.

We were very fortunate to witness all of these natural events in one evening. I say “we” because there was a Wisconsin couple celebrating their 24th wedding anniversary. This was their first time to photograph northern lights or to hear wolves howling. We just happened to end up at the same time in the same place in search of northern lights. We had a lot of fun joking about the wolves and enjoying the beautiful night sky.

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Split Rock Beacon Lighting 001

The next day I drove to Split Rock Lighthouse for the beacon lighting to commemorate the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

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Split Rock Beacon Lighting 002

There were aurora also that night and I had hoped to get photos of the aurora behind the light but clouds moved in blocking all efforts of that happening.

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Melting Sunrise

The next morning I photographed the sunrise outside of Grand Marais. The sun was reflected in the surface of Lake Superior creating one of those melting sunrises. When I clicked the shutter I didn’t realize that this gull was flying right in front of the sun.

MeltingSunrise

Sunset over Lake Superior Beaver Pond

Before a storm arrived we were treated to a nice sunset over Lake Superior. The swirling clouds almost appeared as the start of a tornado. The piles of branches in the photo are this winter’s food supply cached by our local beaver family. This year they used a small bay just outside of the Grand Marais harbor. This is the first time that the beaver have stored their food along the shore of Lake Superior outside of the harbor. The food supply probably won’t survive our typical big northeast storms. Notice the gulls along the rock in the background.

SunsetoverBeaverPond

Mink

Just before I photographed the sunset this curious mink was watching me from behind the beaver lodge. I found out mink can't see very well so he was sniffing the air to try and find out who was invading its space.

Mink