On June 1, 2013, after a few weeks of sporadic aurora activity, I had decided to drive up to Mt Hood’s Trillium Lake to take some photos of the sunset, twilight, and night sky. Over the previous year I had noticed a steady uptick in the number of photographers that would set up along the shores at the lake, but this particular day/night was still in the halcyon pre-Instagram days, where the odds were, if other photographers were there, I would likely know them, and there was plenty of lake shore to spread out and work together.
Shockingly, I did not own a smart phone at the time. I know, I know…the times were different. About an hour after sunset, my wife, who was at home and had an Internet connection, called me to tell me that the KP had jumped up. I immediately looked to the north, and, could just make out faint glimmers of aurora activity in the blue twilight sky.
I settled in and started snapping photos. As the sky got darker the show became more and more clear: Red-pink vertical columns danced above Yellow-green blurs of aurora low on the horizon.
And then something strange happened.
To the northwest of Trillium Lake is an unnamed hill that’s about 500 to 1,000 feet higher than the lake itself. Slowly, over a couple of minutes, a bright band of glow worm-like light grew out of the hill and began to arc across the sky over the lake, so high that it was nearly touching the sky’s zenith. I angled my 14mm lens upward, trying to capture the full display, but it was impossible. I struggled to point my camera straight up; my ballhead and a knob or two on my tripod simply weren’t allowing me to do it. I could’ve reconfigured my center column to get the angle I wanted, but in the dark with limited time I decided to just shoot what I could.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d just met STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), years before STEVE was even STEVE.
And in just 5 minutes, the phenomenon was gone. The strong arc expanded, wavered a bit like it was flapping in the wind, and then it broke up, leaving the aurora display much lower on the horizon to continue on strong.
The above panorama was assembled from 4 or 5 photos to give a greater field of view of the scene. I thought the result was better than any of the frames individually, as I was able to show the lake, a tiny sliver of actual foreground in the lower left corner, a nearby tree (on the left), and then a good amount of sky. (Just to illustrate, Polaris can be found about 4/5ths up in the center of the photograph, and Polaris is about 45 degrees above the horizon. I’m guessing my final result was 60 or more degrees of sky, along with foreground just a few feet in front of me.
