May 10, 2024: A night to remember
All text and images copyright Michael E. Lockwood, all rights reserved unless otherwise noted.
Friday, May 10, 2024 was a very busy day for me.
Work in the morning, getting a workout in, mowing some very tall grass after a lot of rain, and receiving delivery of a used telescope for evaluation filled my schedule before I had to run errands and meet friends for dinner and a tasty beverage.
I kept checking various web sites as the pending geomagnetic storm pegged the various metrics and ratings that describe such storms. It was clear that something extraordinary was happening as evening arrived, and the sun got lower in the west. The power had not gone out, so that was good. The partly cloudy sky seemed to be trending clearer, so I called it an early evening, headed home and unloaded various things before readying two cameras on tripods.
I reviewed one camera manual for video shooting settings, and got prepared and set up. I chose a 14mm f/2.8 prime wide-angle for one camera, and a 24mm f/1.4 for the other. The faster 24mm is better for video of faint things like aurora.
I got both cameras focused properly with the lenses, and switched to manual focus mode to prevent that from changing. I was working with a Canon 5D MkIII and a Canon R-alpha mirrorless. There's nothing like trying to operate two different cameras in the dark under the pressure of a potentially amazing auroral display, so I reviewed the locations of various controls to change parameters on the fly, zoom in, etc.
As soon as it started getting dark, vertical rays became visible immediately in the northeast sky. In my location, the northwest is light polluted, but north is decent, and northeast is good.
It was game on from that time. The display intensified as I shot images and watched it expand from the northern sky into other parts. I was amazed at what was happening.
In early 1990, I believe, I saw a full sky display as a teenager under dark northern Michigan skies. It started as a glow that was noticeable through a windshield in the northern half of the sky as we drove home from a sports banquet. I remember noticing it. When we got home it intensified, and my mom and sister joined me in the back yard as we stared up for an hour or more, watching the full corona overhead display. Later I remember flashing and flickering in the southern sky as the show subsided.
I thought that might be the display of a lifetime after I moved south to Ohio, Indiana, and then Illinois. I had not seen anything close to that until this night, though 2003 was quite memorable (before I had a camera).
Here's how it started (see image above at right), as the northeast sky lit up with bright aurora of multiple colors, particularly the brilliant red pillars extending up very high into the sky. At this point, it was just as good as the last display I photographed and wrote about in April of 2023. See that article here.
I realized what was going on, so I started texting friends, and I called my parents very quickly. The eastern sky suddenly lit up with what was green light. Everything was happening very quickly, and my mind was racing. This could be spectacular.
And then, all at once, it was. The zenith exploded with a moving cascade of light. See below. The phone was put away.
Suddenly this full corona display appeared at the zenith. I was under the auroral curtains as they streamed down into the atmosphere. I twisted my neck to get the camera aimed straight up and fired the shutter repeatedly as some clouds passed.
Satisfied, I went for an improved version of one of the photos I've always wanted, an auroral display over the house/shop. It's my favorite image of the night, below at left, and another version below at right showing the green in the *southern* sky, a sight I had never seen.
The reality of what was happening had sunk in. This was a once in decades event.
After five minutes or so, the overhead display was still going, so I got my wits about me and I scrambled around the property with one tripod looking up and looking for interesting photo angles. Luckily I didn't trip over anything.
The green display in the south shocked me. These were no longer the northern lights, they were the southern, northern, eastern and western lights all at once.
As I moved around to get more shots that I'd probably never have a chance to get again, I noted increased traffic on my rural road, and I hoped that the people were going to stop somewhere and enjoy the display that they surely could see through their windshields. I had no problem seeing it despite staring at bright camera displays periodically to see how things looked.
The other noise that I noted was that of tractors in the fields planting in the almost dark of night. I hoped that the farmers, some using GPS auto-steer, were able to look up and see what I was seeing. Their bright tractor spotlights occasionally shone in my direction as I perched on the high spot of my property to get the full view around from horizon to horizon. High clouds streaked through, looking like features of the display until one noted that they were not changing.
The display was calming down, but the vivid glow of ionized atoms in the upper atmosphere remained, covering the sky. The view below was one of the last that I shot, looking west, as the overexposed crescent moon peeked out from behind a cloud.
Some friends finally stopped by a bit after this, and I handed them my R-alpha to do a real-time scan of the sky. The viewfinder on this camera is the best way I have found to view aurora in real time, as it shows colors vividly and makes moving structures much easier to see. They got to see the vivid reds and greens and a small curtain of green pillars that was still going on to the north.
I did not have time to deploy nightvision, but it wasn't really needed due to the brightness of the display. It could have shown some of the moving structure, though, and I wish I had time to set it up with another camera to shoot video through that while I was shooting images.
I went inside around 11pm and it took me until about 1am to wind down and finally be able to go to sleep, knowing I had a bit of an early morning the next day.
Please check back for future installments of "In the Shop".
Mike Lockwood
Lockwood Custom Optics