“you are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”
― jennifer niven, all the bright places
i had been doing something thinking for a while. 2024 was producing some extraordinary aurora borealis events due to the solar maximus season we were in. previous outings had me being a spectator to some of the most spectacular northern lights i had ever seen. i finally decided tonight was the night to act upon what i had been thinking about. and what was that thought? well….funny you should ask; let me share it with you!
as one who lives in the suburbs of the twin cities, driving north to darker skies for a better chance of capturing the northern lights with my camera is not a short drive. northern lights can be notoriously fickle even with the best of apps and alerts used for predicting when they will appear. they can appear with no warning at all. when one is predicted, at the last minute, it can take on a mind of its own and completely dissipate without showing at all or much weaker than anticipated.
along with that are a couple of other factors related to me personally. first, long drives can make me tired; especially long drives at night. but if i’m going out based on an alert saying there’s a good chance of the northern lights appearing, i’m not going to pull over to sleep if i get tired. i’m focused on getting to a location i have in mind! for pete’s sake man! the northern lights are expected to show! sleep is not on my list of accomplishments at the moment!
second, i’m not wealthy by any means (though to be fair, to most of the world i am very rich as most of us in first world countries are). fuel for the vehicle is not an expense i can just scoff at. it doesn’t mean i don’t drive further as i love to get out into the rural expanse of our state. it just means it’s something i have to think about if it’s in the budget to do or not. particularly when it’s an event that may or may not occur such as the northern lights.
so…..after all that, i’m sure you are thinking, “what is the thought, steve??!!”. it’s crazy but here goes. i decided to try and see if i could capture the northern lights from within the city limits itself. with the intensity of the big shows i had seen, i wondered if it could be captured where there is more light pollution, not less. now, i’m not talking about standing on a bridge or on a high point looking out toward the city skyline and above. i have seen some very cool images of northern lights above the st. paul and minneapolis skyline posted by other photographers. i’m talking about going into the “belly” of the city itself. could i see the northern lights looking outward from within light pollution itself? i was intrigued by it and decided to find out. it might mean sacrificing a spectacular show for a more subtle one. but, hey! if i was able to capture any sort of northern lights, it would be amazing to me as they are not something associated with seen near the city limits overall. to be seen near the magnitude of light pollution from the city, it has to be an explosive aurora borealis event!
the night of september 16, i got an alert on a couple of my aurora apps that there was the potential for a rather significant show. i quickly changed out of my pjs as it was later in the evening, loaded my camera gear in the car and took off for a familiar location for my first try. the location was como park and conservatory. this location, to me, was a good one to start with. while it is in st. paul itself, it is not in an area where light pollution is at its worst. don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of light pollution sources all around the area there. lots of lampposts lining the road and walkways as well as the exterior lighting of the conservatory itself. adding to the mix was the moon; it was at its brightest (actually one day before the complete full moon but it was 94.6% full that night so….). a lot of things were stacking against the probability of seeing the northern lights much if at all.
I arrived roughly around 9:30 pm that night at the conservatory location. I pulled my gear out of the car and walked across the street to the grassy knoll that looks out at the exedra (a veranda across the pond), frog pond and the conservatory. as i experimented with different compositions and settings, by about 9:50 pm, i noticed a faint green starting to appear in the sky over the conservatory on the lcd screen on the back of my camera. for the next few minutes, nothing changed as far as intensity of the northern lights. (just a reminder you can click on any image to bring up in a new window without any other distractions)
at that point, i decided to move to the far end of frog pond across from the conservatory to set up for a new composition. for the next 25 minutes or so, i would do one of two things. i would sit on the bench enjoying the solitude of having the place all to myself, taking in my surroundings as it was lit up pretty well by the moon. i was also watching the skies to see if anything was changing. even though the moon was full, i was still able to see, faintly, the ghostly white outlines of the northern lights. every few minutes, i would get up to create another image. for those 25 minutes or so, the northern lights slowly morphed in various patterns but stayed at the same intensity. i began to think that it was as good as it was going to get. nevertheless, i was pretty excited to have gotten anything at all! i had succeeded in capturing the northern lights in a location with a reasonable bright source of light pollution. not only that, the almost full moon was shining bright.
then, as i was sitting on the bench and looked up to the sky, i saw the unmistakeable movement of ghostly white morphing/pulsing quite strong which usually means the intensity of the northern lights had been kicked up a notch!
i ran back the few steps to my camera and created this image.
to the far right, stronger beams of green lit up. as it was hovering over the exedra off camera, i decided to uproot again and head back to the first location. this put me straight on looking at the northern lights over the exedra. then….boom! right at that moment, the sky lit up! it was crazy! not only were there greens but reds, purples and yellow joined in to create a brightly colored carousel of colors in the sky! this image was literally the next one after the previous one you saw!
i created one image after another. i was in a rare, for me, bit of a “gun shooter” mode that night in that i wanted to create as many images as i could. the intensity of the show was so strong and at such an unlikely location to capture them! every image yielded a new look at the northern lights; sometimes a subtle change and sometimes a dramatic change. i stayed in the same location, panning the camera back and forth between the conservatory and the exedra.
in my excitement at seeing what was unfolding in front of me through my camera lens, i had forgotten that an image i really wanted to create was a panorama using three or four images merged together to include the whole scene in one image. i had discovered earlier when experimenting that my wide angle lens, at its widest, would not capture the whole scene.
at this point, the show was starting to wind down. fortunately, i kept my wits about me and managed to get a couple sets of three images each before the lights returned to a faint green like the very first image. it was like the Creator of this celestial show flipped the switch! as fast as it exploded from a faint green into a vibrant technicolor show, it imploded back to the faint green. you can see in this panorama that it is already starting to subside above the exedra.
soon, even the faint green was gone. for the record, the total time of the harmonious color extravaganza was roughly 7 minutes. by the 10 minute mark, all traces of the faint green was gone.
just in case, i went back to the far end of frog pond looking toward the conservatory in hopes that it might show up again. i hung out for another 2 hours but, alas, the show was definitely over.
but what a night! as i mentioned earlier, i was all alone to take in this celestial celebration of color explosion in the sky! it far exceeded my expectations of what i had hoped to see! oh, there was one other person there that night. a security guard had pulled up by my car after i created one last image at about 12:30 am. i briskly walked over there to let him know i was there. i felt a little bad for him. he seemed pretty tired and looked like he would rather be anywhere other than patrolling in the security car. when i told him what i was doing, he was nice about it but i could tell he was a little annoyed about it as well. maybe he thought i was ludicrous to think about trying to capture the northern lights in this location. i’ll never know but i told him i would wrap it up so he moved on. he had no clue what had happened in the skies above him! but i’ll never forget it! it also got me thinking…alright, what’s the next location i want to try the ludicrous? you'll find that out...when my next blog comes out!
have you ever been privy to a sensational celestial show? maybe you’ve had the chance to see the northern lights. perhaps it was a meteor display. maybe it was the opportunity to see some amazing formation far away in the galaxy through the lens of a telescope! share about it in the comments below. I’d love to hear about it! if you have any thoughts about the images shared or the blog read, share that as well!
these images are available for purchase! if you are looking for a truly unique piece of photographic art, any of these images would certainly fit the bill! while I won’t go so far as to say this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, i don’t think i’d be too far off the mark to say this is not going to an event that will be seen regularly at como park and conservatory. light pollution and the full moon required an amazing show of strength and intensity for it to be seen as vividly as it was that night! this would be a great conversation piece for your home and/or your business! below are a few sample ideas of how they might look hanging on a wall.
if you are interested in purchasing one or more, simply respond below in the comments to let me know which image you are interested in and I will be in contact with you to put together an art piece or pieces that you will enjoy for years! you can shoot an emial to stevehadeen@gmail.com and we can start the process through that avenue as well!
thanks for continuing to support my blogs through reading them. this has been a bit of a tough year for me in writing them. i greatly appreciate that you are still supporting me in that way. hopefully 2025 will see a more productive posting of blogs for all of you to enjoy!
unless something changes, this is my last full length blog of 2024. i want to wish all of you a very merry christmas if you celebrate that holiday. if that is not something you celebrate, then i wish you (and everyone else as well) a happy new year!
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