A few years back, in Phoenix, my Uber driver from the airport to the site of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association's annual meeting in Scottsdale wanted to know about the weather in North Dakota and how cold it had been when I left. He had never felt temperature below zero, and he didn't think he'd want to feel it. But there was mystique about the north for him.

"Have you ever seen the northern lights?" he asked, somewhat wistfully.

I told him I had. It was a fading memory, a green glow to the north from the yard alongside my childhood home outside Billings, Montana. Just a quick dancing light that I remember thinking was fascinating albeit fleeting.

In the years since that encounter in Phoenix, the solar activity seems to have picked up considerably, and I've seen the northern l

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