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Question about the orange glow over Denver last Tuesday, was that the aurora or just light pollution?
I was out at Cherry Creek State Park around 10pm last Tuesday trying to get some shots of Orion with my old Canon and a 50mm lens. The whole northern sky had this weird orange-pink wash to it that I have never seen before, and it showed up in my 20 second exposures as this soft glow behind the treeline. My buddy swears it was the aurora and that people all over Colorado saw it because of that big solar storm they were talking about. I think it might just be the city lights bouncing off some low clouds, since Denver is right there and we do get that dome effect a lot. But the color was off, more pink than the usual yellow sodium glow, and it stretched way higher than normal. I went back and forth on whether to even keep the shots or delete them as junk frames. Has anyone here actually captured the aurora this far south, and if so does it look like a uniform wash or does it have those vertical curtain bands?
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riley_bell9d ago
The pink tint is the giveaway, sodium lights from Denver give you that yellow-orange, never pink. What you saw was almost for sure the aurora, that May storm was huge and people were catching it as far south as Texas and Florida, so Colorado was well inside the viewing zone. One thing though, from Cherry Creek you were fighting the city glow hard, which is why it looked like a smooth wash instead of sharp curtains. Real aurora photos this far south usually show a soft red or pink glow low on the horizon with maybe some faint pillars if you get lucky, not the bright green bands you see from Iceland. Those vertical curtain shots you see online were mostly taken way farther north where the light is stronger. So keep those frames, they are not junk, you probably caught a once in 20 years event for your area. Just push them in editing and you might pull some structure out of that glow.
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