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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

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

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: