The shimmering lights of the aurora borealis glow in the skies around the Arctic Circle, but this past weekend, an extraordinary set of sunspots blew the Northern Lights southward, even as far as Santa Barbara County. Tom Rejzek was there with his DSLR to capture it.
“Reports were showing visible aurora in the states north of us,” Rejzek said. “Unfortunately, it was foggy in Santa Maria,” where he lives, “so I headed inland on Foxen Canyon, and the fog finally broke just south of Alisos Canyon Road” on Friday night. Rejzek said he could see very faint vertical white lines on the horizon, but by using 30-second exposures: “Success!”
What Rejzek’s camera captured were molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the outer atmosphere “excited” by the solar storm arriving to Earth and smashing into the magnetosphere. As the electrons are energized down Earth’s magnetic field lines, the distinctive “dancing” lights emerge, usually one to three days after a big coronal mass ejection travels the 93 million miles to the third planet from the Sun.
