Sunday Night's Stealth Solar Storm and a Few Meteors for Good Measure

We're talking aurora again!

Greetings All,

What is capturing your attention these days?

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that for me it’s the night skies. Here’s another glimpse at the unfolding, this time all from my house, which means a full night’s sleep for the human in my house who keeps “regular hours,” and snacks and even naps for me while my camera keeps astro-vigil.

Another Round of Aurora Borealis

Last weekend I was monitoring the space weather predictions (yes, there are space weather forecasters, check out Dr. Tamitha Skov) and chatter on the Washington Aurora Borealis Facebook group, certain that with clouds in Western Washington and skies choked with wildfire smoke east of the Cascades, that the Northern Lights were going to be a no show, but I ventured out during astronomical twilight on Sunday night and took photos of nothing but clouds just in case.

The sky at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, after 15 minutes of photographing, with a bit of pink high in the northwest. Incentive to keep watch.

After half-an-hour a patch of clouds pushed west as a bright white light spread into the clearing. My camera revealed that the white was actually green glow from the aurora, and soon after with my naked eye I could make out pillars pulsating. The camera showed incredible bright pink and later deep red (which I could see unaided) spreading far to the west and also overhead.

Clouds dispersing as the green glow becomes visible.

Red pillars reaching up out of my 24 mm frame.

I set my camera up for continuous shooting and recorded 1 hour and 40 minutes of 5- second exposures, which was 600 frames. From there I made a time-lapse video (with an easy few clicks in Photoshop) which you can view on YouTube.

A meteor from the Perseids meteor shower streaks across the sky during Sunday’s solar storm.

I was curious if the aurora would be visible in a star trail image, or if it would be “smeared” color, so I layered about 150 of the earlier brighter images (another of half-dozen things I know how to do in Photoshop), and the result was incredibly satisfying!

Aurora and Star Trails. So much color and movement!

The colors of the aurora are caused by particular elements that are excited at certain distances in the earth’s atmosphere.

During the strongest part of the storm we had red, pink, orange, and green aurora.

Here’s an info graphic pulled from a TikTok account (thanks Google search) that provides a quick and easy explanation:

Here’s to Perseus and His Meteor Shower!

The big night sky news all month has been the Perseids meteor shower, one of earth’s longest lasting and most prolific annual events. The skies were clear back on the night of August 6th-7th, and I set up my camera to take an infinite number of 30-second photos, which was 4 hours before my battery died. I had fun making a star trail and then looking for fireballs in individual images and came away with these three.

Seeing other photographers Perseids images this week, I think I trashed a number of meteor images thinking they were satellites (which seem to be visible everywhere all night long). To quote my long-time friend Anne, “Oh, well.”

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I’ll leave you with one last image looking due west and featuring a few of our neighborhood seals during Sunday’s storm, which reached G4 “severe” status, and was seen at least as far south as Chico, CA.

Wishing you all blissful nights, whether sleeping or waking.

~ Cathy