Twice in 2024! Auroras in Central California

Back in May of this year, I saw something I had never seen before: the aurora borealis gracing the night sky over the prairie of the Sierra Nevada foothills. It was an astounding once-in-a-life event. Except it wasn't. The sun has been particularly active this year, and a coronal mass ejection occurred a few days ago that sent charged particles racing towards the Earth. For the second time in my life, I saw the aurora borealis from my home area.

I was teaching an online geology lab and happened across a report that auroras were being sighted in unusual places, and anxiously awaited for my students to finish their work. I checked out my front door and took a shot of the sky in the heavily light-polluted environment, and my phone camera caught the characteristic magenta-pink light. I talked Mrs. Geotripper into taking a late-night drive to the prairie-lands near Willms Road outside of Knight's Ferry on the Stanislaus River.

The lights were immediately evident in my phone camera pictures. They were very dim to the naked eye, but the night shot setting on my phone captured the detailed spires and structures in the lights quite well.

The intensity, color, and pattern of the light changed from moment to moment. It was a nice way to spend an evening!

The lights faded after about an hour and we went home. I hope you got a chance to see them, but if you didn't, please enjoy what we got to see!

The lights were not better or worse than those of last May. They were just different. It was a privilege to be able to view this gift of the cosmos.

 

Searching for a Coronal Mass Ejection....

No, I didn't find any. I'm in Central California, and most of the reports of auroral displays are coming out of the northern tier of states. For instance, this picture from the Great Lakes area was posted at SpaceWeather.com.

What I did in fact do was to grab some folding chairs, drive up out of the dusty hot Central Valley, and set up shop on the shoreline of Pinecrest Lake at about 6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada just north of Yosemite National Park. We sat on the quiet lakeshore, watched the last beams of sunlight on the high peaks, waited through the deepening twilight until thousands of stars were visible, along with a bright Milky Way. Bats flew within inches of our face while we scanned the sky for three hours waiting for the promised show as solar particles bombarded the Earth's magnetic field and interacted with gas molecules in the uppermost atmosphere. We waited for three hours and nothing of the sort happened at our latitude.

A waste of time? Let's see, after a summer of grant writing and crazy politics, I estimate my blood pressure dropped 30 points. One of the few Geotripper's Laws: watching the sun go down on a mountain lake is never wasted time.

But I wanna see pictures from you folks in the higher latitudes!

Pictures I wish I had taken...

On so many levels...I wish I was in Iceland watching the Eyjafjajokull volcano erupt. I wish I was in Iceland watching the aurora. I wish I had the presence of mind to get both in one picture. See the rest of the fantastic photography in this article at Discovery.com news.