See ‘Lady Aurora’s’ Best Dance Moves: Northern Lights in Michigan

ST. IGNACE, MI — Bidwan Baruah, a Milwaukee resident with a passion for photography, loves pointing his camera toward the sky and to see what nature reveals.

He wasn’t disappointed early Saturday morning while visiting Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for the Labor Day Weekend. He was able to to click off a few frames of what he called the “best dance moves of Lady Aurora’s last show” before the fast dance was over.

Baruah, who shared his pictures with Patch, said he has always been fascinated by nature, and the solar system in particular, and loves taking pictures of sunrises, sunsets, eclipses and the like.

His fascination with the northern lights began when he joined the Great Lakes Aurora Hunters Facebook page a couple of years ago. He set out with his camera, but was disappointed by the results.

“I didn't possess the key skills to photograph them,” he said in an email to Patch. “Ever since then, I wanted to photograph them. But staying in Milwaukee with an 8-month daughter, it gets difficult to travel three hours north on a short notice, given how difficult it is to predict them.”

He and his family planned a Labor Day outing to the U.P., a place they had never visited.

“And from Sept 1st onwards, I was getting a lot of notifications from the group on Facebook,” wrote Baruah, a native of Guwahati, India. “I told myself, ‘Maybe I get to see and photograph the lights this time. Maybe I will get a second chance.’ ”

He had booked a lakefront hotel facing Lake Huron in St. Ignace so he would have a perfect vantage point to view and photograph the sunrise.

“And guess what?” Baruah wrote.

Nature rewarded him.

“At around midnight of Sept. 2, I thought, lets check if any ;ights are visible along the horizon, as some people from the group were reporting sightings. And, boy, what a show it turned out to be!”

Baruah said he posted his photos on the Great Lakes Aurora Hunters Facebook page, where they were liked, loved and wowed, and then shared to other Facebook pages, where they were viewed thousands of times in less than a day.

We've featured six of his favorite images from the photo shoot. Enjoy the view.