Did anybody take pictures of yesterday’s northern lights?

Cool! Looks like rainbow obsidian.

This was from family in northern Michigan.  Growing up there I don't remember as much red/pink.   Mostly greens.   Did the pink have to do with the energy of the particles?   We had them here in the Kansas City area too but not nearly as spectacular as further north.  

This is a very sore subject in our house. It was here last week. And we missed it. We should have easily been able to see it. I saw the “news” that said it was expected in the middle of the night. I interpreted this to mean like 1 or 2 am. I work night shift with a lot of trips outside between buildings and figured we’d just see it if it happened. Didn’t see anything. Next day, the owner of the company that we work nights for comes in and shows off pictures of the darn thing!!! He didn’t call us. Apparently it hit at 11:10pm. We were at his store working (inside) and he knew it! Argh. 😤😫Seriously what the heck man! This might seem like an over reaction but this very same guy has called in the past to tell us a planet was visible. Hello…. The planets are always out there!! The Northern Lights down in the lower 48 happens like, once in a lifetime! So, now I’ve got 3 apps on my phone.🤓 They alert you whenever visibility is near. So far I’ve gotten alerts and it’s been just out of range on the map. I did see though that it was dipping down nice and low for you more eastern folks.👍

I couldn't see it at all, but it was pretty vivid on my phone and dslr with long exposures.

khara I'm unsure what apps you're using, but if they use the NOAA ovation map you can potentially see auroras that are 1000 km away (even further actually) than what is shown on the map, provided the storm is strong enough (and dependent on light pollution around you). The ovation map shows the probability and strength of an aurora directly overhead, but that doesn't mean you can't see it on the horizon if conditions are right. For example, I live in southern Victoria and there is heaps of light pollution, but I was able to photograph the aurora when it reached storm levels on the ovation map (high probably = red), even though the green part of the map (low probability) only stretched over half of Tasmania (which is over 400 km away), and the same event was seen by people in Queensland (well over 1,500 km away from where the aurora was directly overhead).

If your apps alert you it's worth seeing if you can get a photo, even if you can't see anything and it appears to be out of range on the map. You just never know

Starguy I did hear some other people say that as well, that they couldn’t really see it unless they were looking through their phone. That’s odd, and interesting, and kind of disappointing…

khara Aurora australis—the southern lights. They are less likely to be seen on mainland Aus. Tasmania is like Alaska; being closer to the pole, they get more auroras.

I think it's quite common to see an aurora better (if at all) using a camera or phone camera than with your eye. It would have to be a very strong storm to be visible to the human eye, and even then a camera will show it better (if that's any consolation).

If you want to use your phone camera, you want to find something to prop your phone against so you don't hold it (and shake the camera). If your phone has the option to change the camera settings (often under "Pro"), good settings to use are multi-focus (or manual focus if you can find something distant to focus on in the dark, which is tough), shutter speed of 15 seconds, white balance of around 3800 to 4000 K (about the same as fluorescent light), and while people recommend an ISO of 500 or more, I dropped it as low as I could because there was a lot of light pollution so a higher ISO blew the sky out (plus a higher ISO means more noise in the photo). These settings are a useful starting point and then you can mess around with them to adjust them to best suit your location and the strength of the storm.

I used a 2 second timer on my phone so that after I pressed the button there was a two second delay for me to prop the phone before it started taking the photo, which meant no shaking (and blurring of the picture) from me touching the camera. My photos weren't the best because of light pollution but I was able to capture something, and it was heaps of fun. People might already know this stuff, but maybe someone will find it useful, so I thought I would share.

Oh, on spaceweather.com website they published an interesting article. It seems in the geomagnetic storm soil and rocks on the eastern seaboard got electrified.


Light pollution is the unintended spillage of light which can cause direct blinding and indirect which means spilling out and brightening the night sky, thus losing stuff like stars and the milky way.

Light pollution may be the easiest of all. Proper lighting meaning shading of lights to block spillage upwards in the easiest. It's a concerted effort, but after interacting with the ESA, the Chile government enacted policies which ensured lighting was properly shielded since they are trying to preserve their night sky.

Fun fact: many of the observatories in the California hills had to close due to encroaching light pollution, thus losing a rich legacy of astronomy in the US

Streetlights are very wasteful in their implementation. Even if you forget about the glare issues lots of drivers experience simply having light shields concentrate the light on the road and nit into the sky and not blinding drivers.

Simple shades on porch lights and in community you will find over time localized lighting helps with both the night sky and energy wastage. When we started correcting lighting home, we found the bulbs we were using was really too bright, and we switched to lower wattage lights and we actually saw the decreased electricity cost.

We often see the point of lighting for security, but if that trend was the case, we should have seen a reduction of crime...not an increase