Aurora, Perseid meteors, and lodgepole pine, August 11-12, Yosemite NP, California. This image shows the Aurora Borealis, plus Perseid meteors captured over the course of about two hours.

The night of August 11th was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Claudia and I marked this date on our mental calendars, thinking it might be nice to head up to the Yosemite high country and look at some meteors.

As the date approached, solar activity increased, bringing a heightened chance of viewing the aurora – possibly even at our southerly location in central California. The combination of meteors and aurora certainly seemed intriguing. And forecasts indicated that the night of the 11th and 12th was the most likely night to see the aurora.

We had an early dinner that evening and drove up to the Yosemite high country after dark. We weren’t in a big hurry, as we knew meteor and potential aurora viewing would be better after the moon set around 11:20 p.m.

I decided to hike up a dome that would give me a view to the north – the most likely direction for seeing the aurora. On top of the dome I could see a bank of clouds to the northeast, and a glow in the sky to the north. Interesting. I knew there were no towns or cities to the north, so I wasn’t seeing light pollution. Could it be the aurora?

The only way to find out was to take a photo, since the camera is much better at seeing faint light and nighttime color than our eyes. So I got out my camera and tripod, took a photo, and… wow! The whole northern sky was red. Definitely the aurora.

So what could I do with that? I needed something interesting in the foreground. I looked at some boulders, but they didn’t line up well with the aurora. Then I remembered a nicely-shaped lodgepole pine nearby. Much better. I set up my camera low to the ground in order to silhouette as much of the tree as possible against the sky. Then I composed, focused, and made an exposure. That first frame showed a pillar from the aurora – very cool. Subsequent frames showed fainter pillars, then none, but the red color persisted.

After a few exposures for the sky I made a couple of separate frames while light-painting the tree with a flashlight. Then I want back to capturing the sky. Over the next two hours I made a nearly-continuous series of ten-second exposures, capturing the changing aurora, but hoping to catch some meteors as well. Meanwhile Claudia and I lay back, looked up at the sky, and enjoyed the meteor shower. We saw lots of meteors, most of them outside the frame of my photo, but the camera managed to capture about seventeen of them.

Back home I got rather busy with work, so it took me awhile to process this image and put everything together, but eventually I assembled a sequence showing the aurora along with multiple meteors. The background frame is that first exposure, showing the aurora and stars. I also very subtly added some light to the tree with the light-painting frames, then blended in just the meteors from the frames that captured them.

Most photographs show a single moment in time. That’s what I do 99.9% of the time. But in this case, no single moment captured what it was like to be up there, on top of that dome, lying back, watching one meteor after another, as the aurora glowed off to the north. I felt that a sequence, showing the aurora with multiple meteors, conveyed that better.

I’ve made similar sequences before while photographing lightning, or showing the sun or moon during an eclipse. It’s a bit like a time-lapse, but in a still photo, with a period of time condensed into one image. This was the first time I had tried photographing a meteor-shower sequence – and managed to capture the aurora to boot. It certainly was a night to remember.

— Michael Frye

P.S. Most of the meteors in this photo emanated from the Perseus constellation, right of center in this composition. (It’s called the Perseid meteor shower because the meteors seem to come out of Perseus.) The one exception is the bright meteor in the upper-right. This was probably not a Perseid, as it didn’t emanate from Perseus. Apparently it was just a random bit of space debris burning up in the earth’s atmosphere.

As the night progressed, Perseus rose, so the radiant – the point the meteors radiate out from – moved up as well. Actually all the stars were rotating counterclockwise around the north star (visible just above the top of the tree). So in order to convey the sense of the meteors emanating from that one point (Perseus), I took all the layers with meteors and rotated them back clockwise around the north star, so they would all radiate out from Perseus’s original position.

It’s not a coincidence that the meteors closer to Perseus have shorter streaks than the ones farther away. The ones closer to Perseus were descending through the atmosphere toward me, so we’re seeing their paths end-on. The ones farther away from Perseus were moving across the sky, descending at more of an angle, so we see longer streaks. When viewing a meteor shower you’re likely to see more meteors looking toward the radiant, but longer, more impressive streaks looking away from the radiant.

P.P.S. Green is the most common color for auroras, and what you typically see at northern latitudes when the aurora is overhead. But at southerly latitudes like ours it’s usually not overhead, but off to the north (in this photograph the aurora was probably over Oregon). We’re only seeing the top of the aurora, in the very upper reaches of the atmosphere, where the color is usually red. Something about oxygen atoms getting excited at higher frequencies, which produces red…

Claudia and I saw a red and pink aurora to the northeast while camping in Death Valley on March 13th, 1989. We didn’t know what it was, and joked that it was a Nevada nuclear test gone wrong. The next day we saw a newspaper article explaining that geomagnetic activity had been unusually strong the previous night, sparking strong auroras that were seen as far south as Arizona. So then we knew what we’d seen. That one was so vivid we could see the red color clearly with our naked eyes.

Related Posts: Lunar Eclipse Over the Trona Pinnacles; Eclipse Journey; Lightning Over the Central Valley

Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He lives near Yosemite National Park in California, but travels extensively to photograph natural landscapes in the American West and throughout the world.

Michael uses light, weather, and design to make photographs that capture the mood of the landscape, and convey the beauty, power, and mystery of nature. His work has received numerous awards, including the North American Nature Photography Association’s 2023 award for Fine Art in Nature Photography. Michael’s photographs have appeared in publications around the world, and he’s the author and/or principal photographer of several books, including Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, and The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite.

Michael loves to share his knowledge of photography through articles, books, workshops, online courses, and his blog. He’s taught over 200 workshops focused on landscape photography, night photography, digital image processing, and printing.