Earth blown away by solar wind from giant coronal hole!
In case you didn't know, I rather like astronomy. When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut, and I was routinely begging my dad to build a spaceship. Clearly, neither of those things happened.
My mom has always wanted to go north to see the aurora. I keep telling her that under the right conditions you don't have to go much farther than the rural country near here. And even if you did go far north, the aurora may not be as brilliant as you see in pictures, because they tend to overexpose the film in order to get some of the more fantastic effects.