Aurora borealis set to light up North American skies this weekend

This weekend, the sun's restless energy reaches down through Earth's magnetosphere and into the night skies of North America, offering a rare and luminous reminder that we live within a dynamic, living cosmos. Solar particles colliding with atmospheric gases will paint the darkness in green, purple, and pink — colors that have stirred wonder in human beings for as long as we have looked upward. The auroral oval, normally confined to the far north, expands southward this Saturday and Sunday, bringing an ancient spectacle to latitudes that seldom witness it. In a world of constant noise, the inv