These pictures are from the amazing aurora display of Sunday, November 7, 2004. At various points during this light show, we witnessed curtains, waves, streaks, vortices, and quick pulses of green, yellow, orange, red, and even violet. On Saturday, November 6, I had my telescope out and thought it might be nice to take some pictures of the sun. I found that there was a prominant sunspot facing right towards the Earth. Given these observations, I thought I might want to keep my eye out for some faint auroras. I never expected such an amazing light show! On Sunday night, I went outside to see if I could see a few signs of auroras and instantly I noticed the strange red streaks in the sky. At this point, the colors were almost completely red. Doren, Emily and I piled into the car and headed out to the dog park in Verona. Along the way, we were almost certainly a driving hazard as we watched the sky turn green outside of the car windows. By the time we got out to Verona 15 minutes later, the auroras were in full force. There were a few times when the auroras were so intense that I found it more than a little bit unnerving. At one point, I was watching these green columns of light descending and then dancing and swirling around in turbulent patterns almost like luminous tornados. I saw curtains, pulsing streaks, waves, and bands of green, yellow, orange, red, blue, and even violet. After this, Doren and I headed farther out into the country where we watched the auroras for about an hour or so and saw mostly rivers, streaks and a few curtains of green. As we were driving back into Madison, I thought that just for a lark, I would see if the auroras were visible above the capitol since that would make such a nice "postcard" picture. Within minutes of arriving at Olin Park near the downtown skyline, the aurora display went wild. For about 5 to 10 minutes, we could see green, yellow, orange, blue, and even violet with the naked eye.