One of the more powerful solar storms in the past 20 years spawned a rare display of the Northern Lights in Baker County on Friday night, May 10.

The show continued on Saturday and Sunday nights.

On Friday night, Highway 86 east of Baker City had an unusual amount of traffic as residents avoided light pollution to get a glimpse of the phenomenon usually confined to areas hundreds of miles to the north.

With the naked eye the aurora borealis was conspicuous, but photographs revealed much brighter shades of green and red.

Human eyes have two types of photoreceptor cells, rods and cones. Cone cells detect colors during bright light during the day, but at night we mainly rely on rod cells, which lack the ability to distinguish colors other than black, white and shades of gray, according to the Arizona State University’s “Ask A Biologist” website.

Rods work at very low levels of light, but they don’t contribute to color vision. The human eye has more than 100 million rod cells.

Cones require a lot more light and they are used to see color. The human eye has far fewer cone cells, about 6 million cones.

Cameras don’t have such limitations and can capture images showing a fuller range of the colors the Northern Lights can produce.

Please turn to Page A6 for more photos of the Northern Lights submitted by local residents.