We’re in the midst of quite the geomagnetic storm right now, and last night it brought a much finer display of Northern lights to my section of the Willamette valley than the much stronger (and considerably rarer) G5 storm in May.
According to NOAA, multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs) arrived from the sun this weekend, producing a G3-G4 storm last night.
Back in May, I was much more prepared – I watched the clock, had my camera and tripod ready, researched all the proper camera settings, and dutifully stayed up late trying to get some amazing shots. Not much luck though. In fact,after seeing all the great shots from others during that time period, I confess to being a bit disappointed that we didn’t see more here.
This time I was taken totally by surprise.
I was on my way to bed but then decided to check my social media one more time in case I’d gotten any messages. It was awash with exclamations of the northern lights being back, so I decided to go out and look.
They were much more visible to the naked eye this time than last time, so I went back to get my partner and my camera, not taking the time to change lenses or get the tripod.
The show went on for quite some time, so I went back to get a better lens, and then later a wider angle lens and my tripod. I’m SO grateful I stopped being lazy and finally went back for the tripod and the right lens. I really did make a huge difference in photo quality.
(I’d had a long day and was hella tired. This woke me up substantially, though, and I had a hard time getting to sleep afterwards.)
The Perseid meteor shower was supposed to be going off too, but I only saw one and that was while I was moving my camera to a different location on the hill. Totally wish I could have gotten them in the shot as well, but they haven’t been making much of an appearance in our night sky this year.
Geomagnetic storms are caused by the interaction between solar particles and Earth’s magnetic field. The sun’s moving into one of its more active periods and has been emitting quite a few intense solar flares recently, as well as copious CMEs.
According to NOAA, all of this is due to the ongoing “Solar Cycle 25,” which has reached one of the its highest levels of sunspot activity in 20 years – the sun is approaching its solar maximum and that makes both CMEs and solar flares both more common and more powerful.
Did you catch any photos of the northern lights last night? They’re much easier to see through a camera than with the naked eye.