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Friday, May 10, 2024

Bright aurora borealis over the Gateway Arch in St. Louis - May 10, 2024

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

I took a chance with the northern lights show tonight. Instead of going out into the country where dark skies would maximize aurora viewing and photography, I set up in downtown St. Louis. Not only were the KP-9 auroras more than bright enough to view in the middle of a big city, good exposures were made possible by the Gateway Arch's main lights being off during the month of May for the bird migration. If those lights had been on, the Arch would have been far too bright for the longer exposures needed to show the aurora well. The result of this rare combination of circumstances was a successful capture of shots I wasn't sure were even possible - until tonight!

Click on each image for a larger version and to order prints:

Auroras were visible in the eastern sky!

This was looking southeast:

After the Arch grounds closed at 11pm, I went back to near home and shot photos until sunrise. Another bright burst of aurora associated with a substorm reaching KP-8 lasted from 2:30am until daybreak. It was not as intense as the first one, but had frequent tall visible-to-the-eyes pillars of greem, red, purple and blue reaching to overhead! This was from near Germantown: