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At approximately 4:10 am MST on October 28, 2003 a gargantuan solar flare errupted from the surface of the Sun. This coronal mass ejetion (CME) was the third most powerful solar flare recording in the last 30-years. Travelling at more than 4 million miles per hour, the charged particle buckshot from this event would reach Earth in just about 20-hours. News of the flare was all over the Web just a few hours after it occurred. I started making plans to photograph a rare Arizona display of the Aurora Borealis.
That's why I was sitting in a lawn chair in a field off Cedar avenue at 12:00 midnight. My Nikon F3 was waiting patiently atop its tripod just feet away. I was bundled against the autumn chill and watching the sky. By 12:30 am MST, October 29 I thought I could detect a most subtle burgundy hue to the sky around Polaris. About an hour later, the real show began.
Cutain on this aurora went up at 1:35 am MST, October 29. That's when the sky around the San Francisco peaks begain to glow white. Within a few seconds, colors of red, green and blue began reaching skyward from behind the mountains. The above photo captures those early moments of the display. As with all four images from this aurora, this photo is a 20-second exposure on Fuji Superia 800 color print film. I used a 35-70 mm zoom lens set at 35-mm, f/3.3 for the exposure.
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Revised: October 31, 2003 [WDF]