Northern Lights In Amarillo? Yeah, We Just Got Punked.
If you're an astronomy person or just someone who likes seeing cool things, then you most likely got excited about some news we heard recently.
If you went out to look for it however, you were probably let down in a major way.
Earlier in the week, there was a lot of talk about how we were going to be able to see the Northern Lights here in Amarillo this weekend.
The news was that between the hours of 10p-2a, we'd get a glimpse at one of the most glorious, beautiful natural phenomenon.
If you don't know what the Northern Lights are, in a nutshell, it's curtains of colored lights you can see in the sky. It's created by solar activity that eject a cloud of gas from the sun. If it reaches Earth, it collides with the Earth's magnetic field. As they collide, it creates the glorious colors you can see in the sky.
Now, it's something you can supposedly see quite often, but it's more common at higher latitudes and the Earth's poles. So places like Alaska, Canada and Antarctica are more likely to see the lights.
When word came down that we could see them in Amarillo, a lot of us went rushing outside to check the skies. Alas, we were let down as they weren't visible to us.
Now to be fair, we aren't exactly a high latitude place, but the thought of being able to catch a glimpse of them excited a lot of people. Was it something that we were REALLY going to see? Probably not, but the reports that were coming out on it sure made it sound like we were definitely going to catch a good glimpse of them.
I think we were all just in an episode of "Punk'd", but Ashton Kutcher didn't pop up anywhere to tell us.