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(not actually bored.) This is a community with a lot of photography talent. Curious how many reefers said good night to the tank and aimed the camera at the skies during the once in a generation solar storm 5/10-12. Post what you got and where you saw it from!
I've always lived in the deep south and have had a lifelong dream of seeing an aurora. So I've had in the back of my mind a far-fetched plan for one day when there's a forecast solar storm with a good enough likelihood, I'll drive 5-6hr north, spend a couple of hours shooting pics, and drive back home and just be miserable at work the next day.
On Thu I found out there was a massive sunspot many times the size of the usual ones, so large that if you had leftover eclipse glasses - you could put them on and simply see the spot on the sun without any magnification. That afternoon, I got home and got this shot with a solar filter and big telephoto lens.
You can see the spots in the upper middle are normal sunspot sized, and the bottom is the monster sunspot complex they call AR3664. It's apparently 16x the size of the earth.
By Thu night I ran across the info that previously, that sunspot had sent out 4 x-class solar flares within 24 hr, and although none of them on their own were enough to get excited about, NOAA's spaceweather prediction was estimating that the 4 flares would combine to affect earth in the biggest geomagnetic storm since 2005 - overnight Friday/Sat morning.
So I started telling my wife this might be the one - everything was looking best possible case - skies would be clear, no moon. The predictions got more confident on Fri - the storm started arriving early, auroras were being seen at nightfall in western europe, and the family was persuaded to pack up and get in the car at kid bedtime on Friday night. We'd drive from North MS headed north up to ~4 hr looking for aurora. Hoping that this gave us a shot to see far enough north to catch some aurora high in the atmosphere over the North central US somewhere on the distant horizon.
We didn't even get 2 minutes from the house - as soon as we were on the main highway, we were seeing curtains of red and green in the sky over town. And not low in the sky far to our north - high overhead - like right on top of us.
Here's a handful of my favorite shots. Would love to see yours.
These were all looking East between 9-10pm Fri 5/10/24. I love the mix of colors and structures you can see in those shots.
The thing that is so unbelievable and feels so once-in-a-lifetime about this is how far South the aurora was at this point.
This is what looked like a radiant point where most of the movement and streaks seemed to be coming toward us from. It was overhead TO THE SOUTH - from our point of view in North Mississippi. This means the charged particles were entering the atmosphere in our area hundreds and hundreds of miles further south than even the most optimistic predictions.
After 10pm or so, the most insane activity was gone and there wasn't too much to see.
But even as late as 2-2:30am (back at our house - kids in bed) there was still visible red vertical streaks above some lower green if you looked far to the north.
Anyway, that was totally nuts. I'd love to see any aurora pics from where you were.
I've always lived in the deep south and have had a lifelong dream of seeing an aurora. So I've had in the back of my mind a far-fetched plan for one day when there's a forecast solar storm with a good enough likelihood, I'll drive 5-6hr north, spend a couple of hours shooting pics, and drive back home and just be miserable at work the next day.
On Thu I found out there was a massive sunspot many times the size of the usual ones, so large that if you had leftover eclipse glasses - you could put them on and simply see the spot on the sun without any magnification. That afternoon, I got home and got this shot with a solar filter and big telephoto lens.
You can see the spots in the upper middle are normal sunspot sized, and the bottom is the monster sunspot complex they call AR3664. It's apparently 16x the size of the earth.
By Thu night I ran across the info that previously, that sunspot had sent out 4 x-class solar flares within 24 hr, and although none of them on their own were enough to get excited about, NOAA's spaceweather prediction was estimating that the 4 flares would combine to affect earth in the biggest geomagnetic storm since 2005 - overnight Friday/Sat morning.
So I started telling my wife this might be the one - everything was looking best possible case - skies would be clear, no moon. The predictions got more confident on Fri - the storm started arriving early, auroras were being seen at nightfall in western europe, and the family was persuaded to pack up and get in the car at kid bedtime on Friday night. We'd drive from North MS headed north up to ~4 hr looking for aurora. Hoping that this gave us a shot to see far enough north to catch some aurora high in the atmosphere over the North central US somewhere on the distant horizon.
We didn't even get 2 minutes from the house - as soon as we were on the main highway, we were seeing curtains of red and green in the sky over town. And not low in the sky far to our north - high overhead - like right on top of us.
Here's a handful of my favorite shots. Would love to see yours.
These were all looking East between 9-10pm Fri 5/10/24. I love the mix of colors and structures you can see in those shots.
The thing that is so unbelievable and feels so once-in-a-lifetime about this is how far South the aurora was at this point.
This is what looked like a radiant point where most of the movement and streaks seemed to be coming toward us from. It was overhead TO THE SOUTH - from our point of view in North Mississippi. This means the charged particles were entering the atmosphere in our area hundreds and hundreds of miles further south than even the most optimistic predictions.
After 10pm or so, the most insane activity was gone and there wasn't too much to see.
But even as late as 2-2:30am (back at our house - kids in bed) there was still visible red vertical streaks above some lower green if you looked far to the north.
Anyway, that was totally nuts. I'd love to see any aurora pics from where you were.
