June 2017 LIGO Trip Aurora

Photos and narrative by Pat Hanrahan: the light dome off to the north before it expanded.

The awakening: I was about to quit for the night and had already packed my camera away. But then Greg Babcock notified me that things had suddenly changed.

Rays: at this point the aurora was quite active and the rays could easily be seen moving across the sky. Before some of the rays appeared, we could see a bright spot on the horizon that soon shot up into the sky.

Brightest point. This unexpected auroral event was caused by the relatively minor Coronal Mass Ejection of May 23. When it arrived, it caused a geomagnetic storm that reached a rating of G3 (strong). TheWeatherNetwork.com ranked the event as "The brightest and most intense auroras since 2015 were spotted over parts of Canada."