12:00 AM, Saturday, May 11, 2024

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2024 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2024 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

Giant explosions from the surface of the sun earlier this week – a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) – created a burst of high energy particles that slammed into the Earth this weekend. While solar storms happen relatively frequently, this is the first time I can recall that the effects of were significant enough to be visible from Oakland: must have been a doozy!

CMEs can take awhile to reach the earth (from 15 hours to several days, depending on the particle velocities), so the worldwide news media got everyone pumped up about the light show before it arrived.

I headed outside around 11:30 PM Friday night to see what I could see, and ended up spending about an hour or so watching the sky slowly pulsing red from the recent CME event. Although I had reasonably dark sky looking north, there's still plenty of ambient light pollution from the bay area metropolis spread out to the west and south, making the show rather subtle rather than awe-inspiring.

After watching a bit, I headed inside to grab a camera and tripod to see what I could capture. What followed was a good bit of comic frustration. First strike is that I don't see very well anymore, especially in the dark. Second strike is that I was using Ting's camera. It's a very good Sony pocket camera, but there's no substitute for familiarity, and I wasted a lot of time messing with settings in the dark and taking unsatisfactory photos. Eventually I got a better handle on what I needed to be doing, and the photos below are lightly processed shots that I shared with folks the next day. Someday I'll sit down with proper photo editing software and see if I can come up with anything good, but for now, this is what you get!

4.3 sec autofocus

Although the color is much more saturated than my live experience, this picture is reasonably close to what the sky looked like to the naked eye: to me, this short really captures the hazy, diffuse quality of what I was seeing. In retrospect, it would have been cool to try and capture that naked eye aspect of the experience, but at the time, I had no clue about how I might do that.

Researching the topic later on, it turns out that there's no consensus equivalence between human eye perception and what we can get from our cameras: there are too many variables, and no way to reliably compare the two things to one another – what you see on a screen might look like the sky, but it will look different when you view that picture later, and you won't have anything to compare to but your memory of the sky. Score one for Mother Nature!

You can click the thumbnails to zoom in, and click again for full size. If you see severe jpeg banding, that's probably an artifact of your monitor settings (on my setup, I can just barely see it affecting this first picture).

This photo is looking pretty much directly north across the east bay hills towards Vallejo. The utility pole and power lines at the bottom of this photo are about 100 yards away on a cross street.

8.7 sec autofocus

Here's one with double the exposure time. It seems odd to me that the metadata disagrees with the camera settings (4 & 8 sec exposures according to the camera menus). Maybe the metadata records the time from start of capture to start or end of writing the file data?

The longer exposure really brings out the city-glow. My guess is that the ambience on the right horizon is from Orinda, tucked into a valley about 3 mi away and a thousand feet lower than my shooting elevation. To the naked eye, the scene was much darker: just enough ambient light to make out the shadow of the trees overhead and the hilltop in the distance. The pair of nearly vertical red lights is from a radio tower at least half a mile away.

For this shot I had turned my tripod slightly to the east of north, thinking that the distant city-glow might help provide contrast to the sky-show. The grassy foreground was about 20 feet away, across the street and slightly up from my tripod.

After shooting these, I wasn't really happy with what I saw reviewing things on the camera screen, so I went back inside to look on the big computer monitor, then made the key choice to force the camera to manual focus at infinity. When I got back outside 15 minutes later, the event seemed to be tapering off a bit, but I got a bunch of long exposure shots that are quite crisp. Here's a good one:

30.3 sec manual focus

Yay! Good enough for an amateur hack photographer like me!

It's surprising to me how much the long-exposure shots look like dusk or twilight.

In actuality, it was pitch black outside (no moon right then), and you could only barely discern the horizon of the hilltop to the north (about a half-mile away) from the sky beyond it because of the glow coming up from Orinda.

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2024 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2024 event list! ☸ On to the next event!