Seeing an aurora from California is unusual enough. Photographing one from roughly a hundred miles north of Los Angeles turned an already rare night into one of those moments when the camera records more than your eyes can immediately process.
A rare Southern California sky
Long exposures revealed structure and color across the northern sky that was much subtler to the naked eye. The photographs in this gallery document that geomagnetic event as it appeared from California — an astronomical phenomenon in a place where most people do not expect to see it.
Part of the pleasure of night-sky photography is that the camera becomes an instrument as much as an artistic tool. It can accumulate faint light, expose structure and make visible something that was present all along but just beyond ordinary perception.