There is only one place Patrick Rowan would be during a solar storm — ready to photograph the results. That’s exactly where the former manager of the Planetarium at the Springfield Museum — and the Skywatch columnist for The Republican — was Friday night, set up in his backyard in Florence waiting for the confluence of science and art to display itself.
“I am an avid Aurora watcher,” he said, using the other name for the northern lights. “When the sun goes through its roughly 11-year cycle that they call the solar maximum, it reaches a peak of activity and as it ramps up we get more solar flares and prominences and importantly, those ejections of solar material get thrown out into space.”
