It’s no secret by now that the little red dwarf that makes our lives possible has been very electromagnetically active lately. In 2024 and 2025 there have been several events leading to Aurora Borealis visibility all the way to at least the southern USA. Yesterday a powerful X5-class solar flare (the strongest of the year so far) plus a fast coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere, triggering a rare G4-level geomagnetic storm. I’m not geeky enough to know exactly what all that means beyond knowing that a G4 storm is getting strong and triggers aurora.
As I mentioned in my previous intro post, it is getting harder and harder for me to stay up late enough to do the amount of nightscape/astro-photography that I’d like to. For this reason, and the fact that many of these aurora events tend to be strongest near midnight, prior to yesterday’s event I hadn’t captured aurora through my lens.
I had heard nothing about last night’s event prior to sundown and was getting ready for bed when a last glance at social media showed me several posts from the southeast, including Arkansas, with vibrant aurora images from just an hour earlier. I reminded myself that I’d yet to photograph one of these events and went out on my back porch and looked to the north. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary in the sky making me hopeful of getting to bed in time. However, I was also very much aware than many of these events aren’t visible to the naked eye and only a camera’s ability to gather light over time reveals them. Therefore, I grabbed my camera and headed out to the back porch again. I cranked up the ISO (light sensitivity) and took a 10 second exposure, not even using a tripod, just to see if anything was really going on (and partially hoping it wasn’t). Well, this was the result.
Obviously it’s blurry from holding the camera by hand but it told me everything I needed to know about when my bedtime would REALLY be!
Tired or not, I changed back out of my pajamas and took a short drive. Not having much time to plan, I went to a little spot alongside US 395 where the highway runs due north and set up a shot. The aurora were still not naked-eye visible per se, but when I first got there I could see pink reflections in the clouds, presumably reflecting from stronger activity beyond my horizon.
This first image is one of the earlier frames I shot when I could still see the auroras reflecting in the clouds and the camera rendered them very bright. I thought the headlights of an oncoming vehicle added a nice anchor point in the distance and gave some nice subtle lighting to the foreground.
I tried for quite some time to get a good light trail from the occasional big rig going by to the north and I admit I did quite poorly getting the exposure right for half an hour or more until I finally got some settings that didn’t badly overexpose the scene beyond what I wanted to try to fix. By then the aurora were much less pronounce but still completely visible and I got a nice 25 second exposure of a northbound rig “light painting” the roadside as it drove along.
All in all, I’d say it was definitely worth pushing my bedtime back for and now I find myself watching this evening’s cloud forecast as more activity is supposed to happen this evening. Stay tuned.
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