EDITOR'S LETTER

I wasn't surprised to hear from Jack. I knew he’d be in the thick of it. That’s why he has a Pulitzer in his portfolio. And that's why, at the age of 81, he’s on assignment for National Geographic. There was no way he’d be sitting at home on the night of May 10, watching reruns of Yellowstone. Not with a solar superstorm raining down on the Sonoran Desert.

It was a “ ‘Holy s---’ evening,” he said to me with boyish enthusiasm, as if he were Tom Sawyer telling Huckleberry Finn about stowing away on a steamboat. “I spent the night out there.” And what a night it was.

NASA first detected signs of the solar storm on May 7. Over the next few days, several strong solar flares and at least seven coronal mass ejections raced in our direction at a speed of 3 million mph. "The CMEs all arrived largely at once,"; says Elizabeth MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA who specializes in heliophysics, "and the conditions were just right to create a really historic storm."

"I had a feeling it might be strong, based on the NOAA forecast," Jack says. "I got out there about 6 o'clock and drove around looking for compositions. I knew where the aurora was going to be in the sky, so I got myself oriented and found a place to camp close to where I wanted to shoot. That was critical — you don't want to be running around the desert at night trying to find something at the last minute."

After that, Jack did what he always does. He made a collection of incredible photographs, including the shot on our cover. For that, he used a 50 mm lens. "It's the sharpest lens that Sony makes," he says. "It's my go-to … my favorite lens. I also used a headlamp to establish a focus point. The cover image is shot at f/4, which gives you a depth of field from the sharp spines on the saguaro to the stars in the background, which is pretty hard to do."

Unless you're Jack Dykinga.

It takes some degree of hubris to make it to the top. And once you get there, the people down below are always looking up, expecting something more. Not many artists can maintain that level of excellence, but Jack keeps getting better with age. Like The Rolling Stones. That was reiterated the night of the aurora borealis. His photographs are the best I’ve seen, but they weren’t the first. A few hours before he started sending me JPEGs, our Instagram feed was lighting up.

Ashley Leah, Randy Woods, Nate Meraz, Christian Garcia, Crystal Sibson, Joe Grana, Brandon Hill, Josh Weinberg, Alexis Favis, Kelvin Garcia, Sam Houston, Nilay Jariwala, Diana Nichole … so many photographers shared their wonderful images with us. And we’re grateful. The tags we get on Instagram help us see things we might not have seen otherwise. The northern lights are a good example. We saw photographs from all around the state, including the Superstition Mountains. That’s where Casey Olson was set up.

"At first I decided on the west side of the Superstitions," she says. "I got some photos of the setting moon — you could see a wall of purple and pink on the right side of the shots — but I worried it wasn't dark enough, so I raced toward the darker skies on the south side, where my friend Kenny LaRose, a sky-chasing nomad, was stationed. Within minutes of arriving, before we could even get fully set up, we started seeing pink over the Superstitions. With our eyes.

Although it's hard to predict the solar storms that cause the northern lights, scientists at NOAA are expecting more strong auroras as the sun reaches its "solar maximum." Conventional wisdom suggests the peak could happen sometime this year. Perhaps in November. If it happens, I know where Jack Dykinga will be. He’ll be camped in the desert. In the perfect spot. Quietly waiting for what Neil Young calls the icy sky at night.

"It's the special vision of wonder that keeps drawing me back," Jack says. "Once you see that whirling string of lights coloring the sky … you're hooked. I wasn't sure what I'd see out there on the night of May 10. Initially, it was looking a little hopeless, and I was out there grumbling, but as it turned out, is was pretty damn amazing."