Red Airglow Ripples
Taken by Aaron Watson on December 18, 2025 @
West Elk Mountains, Colorado
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Details:
It was a fun night - clear, dark, and relatively warm. I noticed there was a strong solar wind kicking up some aurora in the northern latitudes, so I set up an All Sky camera to see what was going on. After a few test shots, I noticed some faint banding of light and dark in the playback screen, so I set up a timelapse to see the motion. The animation covers about 40 minutes of time, but the action was already in progress when I started and continued after I stopped recording.
The gain on the camera was pretty high - 6400 ISO at 20 sec f 2.8, so the structure of the airglow is fairly faint - I could not detect it with my unaided eye alone. I post-processed in lightroom using my All Sky filter. Usually the airglow I see is neon green, but this was different and had a faint red color.
I have been seeing much less green airglow in the past 6 months, but I have also been picking up more red airglow lately, either because simply there is less green, or due to a different mechanism causing more red. This is the first time I was able to capture the red airglow in an animation.
I read a research paper recently (Linking solar minimum, space weather, and night sky brightness -
Albert D Grauer, Patricia A Grauer -2021) showing that airglow can become brighter after a negative polarity solar wind event. The animation is with north up, so the airglow is moving overhead from north to south, as if the source was from somewhere north. In curiosity, I wonder… is this the solar wind causing the ripples, like how gently blowing on the surface of water creates ripples?
2:17 - 2:56 AM MST Dec 18, 2025 (9:17-9:56 UTC DEC 18 2025)
Nikon D750
Photographer's website:
https://www.skies-alive.com/gallery
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