On March 26th (2018), I had finished my short trip to the Baja peninsula and was spending the night camping near Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The sky was incredibly clear, totally free of clouds, so I had skipped shooting sunset and was instead exploring around my campsite looking for good compositions for shooting the Milky Way later that night.
However, while walking around in the twilight, I noticed that something strange was happening on the western horizon. Venus was glowing brightly—along with a number of strangely colored clouds. The sight was really pretty stunning, and I immediately got excited and ran to get my camera equipment. I had never seen noctilucent clouds before, and I had also never seen iridescent clouds before. Somehow, interestingly, these seemed to be both, and I couldn’t recall having ever heard of that phenomenon.
For the next hour or so I shot various photos, scrambling to find a foreground without missing the show. As it turned out, I could’ve spent a little more time looking for compositions, since the clouds were readily apparent for about an hour, but I didn’t know that at the time (and I’m pretty happy with the compositions I did find).
My first photo was taken at around 7:31 pm, about 44 minutes after sunset (which was at 6:47 pm on March 26th), during nautical twilight.
This second photo was taken almost 10 minutes later, with a slightly different composition. This was taken at the end of nautical twilight.
This third photo, a panorama, was taken at about 7:57 pm, over a full hour after sunset. Taken with a higher ISO, you can see a number of stars that have emerged during astronomical twilight. Additionally, the strange noctilucent iridescent clouds have settled lower onto the horizon.
Have you ever seen anything like this before? Do you have any insights?
I’ll continue to add to this blog post as I find out more about these clouds. In the meantime, please feel free to share this post by using the buttons below.
UPDATE
Since first posting this I found this article in the Washington Post, which states that the clouds likely came from the exhaust of two Trident missiles launched from the Pacific Test Range, off the coast of Southern California.
