Last night’s aurora borealis was the best I’ve seen here in Arizona. It happened on Tuesday, November 11, 2025 and includes comparisons to the May 2024 and October 2024 events that I was also able to witness and photograph, which were also good. The aurora is usually much farther north. But during solar maximum cycles, which peak every 22 years, coronal mass ejections from the sun can become large and powerful enough to reach Earth, 93 million miles away. If a strong solar storm erupts and the ionized particles it emits intersect with Earth’s orbit, it can lead to the aurora being seen far closer to the equator in both the northern and southern hemispheres than normal. (Polar auroras are common closer to the poles even during solar minimums, however.)

I spent about 2.5 hours yesterday night (Tues Nov 11, 2025) taking a variety of auroral scenes of my garden and house. I was fortunate to be outside with my camera ready at the exact time between about 9:40 and 9:55 PM MST in the USA when the red glow and light pillaring effect was at its strongest. Even a casual observer would have readily seen it at that point, although the effect is intensified with time exposure pictures in a camera using a tripod. Here are some of those images.

The evening started with a friend traveling through Missouri, working on a night filming process he’s been doing for years whereby he captures time lapse footage of the Milky Way galaxy at different latitudes and times of year. He wanted to get a time lapse of the Milky Way over a cypress tree swamp with fall foliage colors, and when the forecast came in for a much rarer event, that being a possible far-southern aurora, he decided to film that instead.

Upon hearing that I went out into the night here in Arizona to see if it was also visible here, and it was. I set up my camera and tripod and made a few quick exposures, then came back inside to download them onto my laptop and then posted the one shown below on social media to inform people to go outside and look. Auroras are not only rare, but also unpredictable and very short-lived, so if you want to see one you generally need to act quickly. I’m posting this image because it’s nice enough and it served the purpose of getting word out. Then I returned to outside and spent the next 2.5 hours taking more photos, which are the ones I liked best.

This was my first Arizona aurora photo from about 7 PM on Tuesday, November 11, 2025. I took several others that were similar but thought this one was the nicest.

I went back outside and set up my camera behind my house, looking to the north where the faint red glow was happening. Had I not been told about the aurora by my friend filming in Missouri, however, I would likely have missed the entire thing. What you see moment to moment with your eyes is not what a camera using cumulative light exposure sees, and the red glow becomes much more obvious if you let the technological process of time exposure light gathering play out. The red is intensified by higher ISO camera settings (more sensitive) and time exposures (in this case 30 seconds) so a photo like this not an entirely accurate depiction of what you see with the naked eye. This photo was taken at about 8 PM MST in western Arizona. Like I said, the aurora was mostly a faint red glow over the inky darkness of the sky, but it was noticeable if you were looking for it.

The red coloration of a southerly auroral event is actually most common in more temperate regions closer to the equator and is quite rare near the polar regions, where shades of green, blue, and yellow are the most abundant. Both red and yellowish-green light wavelengths are cause by ionized oxygen, but red is emitted at the upper levels of the atmosphere while the yellow-green is from lower down. Since the yellow-green ionized oxygen is closer to the observer’s eyes, it is therefore the predominant color seen. If the ionization is strong enough to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere farther south (it usually isn’t) then the yellow-green hues will happen there too. Red is usually masked by the other colors at the polar regions which is why it’s pretty rare up north.

A few mid-level clouds started forming as I did my photo session, and the reflected urban light pollution of Las Vegas, NV and Kingman, AZ to the north of me lit the clouds from below with the usual yellowish-orange hue. The red auroral glow is far above the cloud layer, and on a normal night the sky would simply have been black and sprinkled with white stars.

This photo was taken at around 9 PM during a lower-activity part of the aurora, when much of the sky was black; although to the north the red glow was apparent, once again especially on camera. This view is to the northwest and excludes the primary zone of the aurora, which was happening to the north and northeast. However I wanted to get the typical dark sky in one part of the photo along with the glowing red part to the side, mainly to highlight the differences. Again, the urban light pollution of Las Vegas is reflecting off of the mid-level cloud layer, adding the yellowish-orange color that is familiar to most of us since it happens every night.

As I migrated around the garden to catch different plants and scenes, a few more high clouds materialized. Reflecting the yellowish and orange lights of urban Las Vegas and Kingman, they lent a nice multicolored effect to the sky. On an ordinary night the bright red would be entirely absent. This was at about 9:25 PM.

One note on the illumination of the plants in my pictures: I like the appearance of showing the plants in my garden with lighting, as opposed to leaving them as dark silhouettes against the sky. Both effects are valuable, but personally I prefer to see the garden in a three dimensional way since I work hard to grow and maintain it, and there are plenty of interesting visual elements to observe. I think that nocturnal silhouetting works better for my tastes in a simpler composition scene, perhaps a fully wild and natural one with only one or two cacti, Joshua trees, or whatever else as foreground elements. For me, knowing that I am missing out on the chance to show my garden in a seldom-seen way, underneath an aurora borealis, by leaving its complexity at ground level in the dark isn’t an artistic choice I want to make. I’ve tried both types of photos but I just really love this deeper, layered, lit look over the simpler, dark, silhouetted look in this context.

To that end, the technical details of how I achieve this appearance are quite mundane. First, I have to get the scene into proper focus. This isn’t always easy since the camera has trouble deciding on where the focus should be under low light conditions, so I try to light up a foreground element (usually a large plant of whatever type) so that the camera latches onto that, and then get the exposure started. Sometimes I still discover that the focus was off, and it can be very frustrating to learn that a nifty lightning strike or aurora/cloud composition is ugly due to blurriness. So I really try to verify that the camera is correctly focused before I get it going so as to avoid irritation and disappointment.

Then, depending upon the ISO sensitivity I’m using and the length of the exposure I paint the scene with a single white LED headlamp powered by three small rechargeable AAA batteries. I might light paint for just a second or two at ISO 800, or for as much as 10 to 15 seconds for ISO 100. While I don’t usually use the daytime ISO 100 setting at night very often, since by definition it’s not sensitive and can easily underexpose a nighttime scene, there are times when I do use it, especially if lightning is quite close by. Lightning, if it happens to occur during a high ISO setting photo, can totally wash out a scene since it’s so brilliant. That is why I sometimes try to balance this conundrum by using a low ISO 100 setting and compensating for it by using a longer time exposure to gather more light. That enables me to hopefully get both details I’d miss in the landscape while leaving the intense flash of lightning also properly exposed. It’s admittedly a bit of a crap shoot and there are often a lot of dark, underexposed results without meaningful lightning bolts being captured; but when it works, the effect is magical.

This night, of course, lightning was not an element being factored in – although it would be super cool if you could get both an aurora AND a lightning storm! Possible in theory, but extremely rare. So I was mostly using ISO settings of between 400 and 800, and exposure lengths of between 30 and 40 seconds. Using a higher number like ISO 800 can capture more details like smaller stars in the sky but can also result in a grainier appearance of the photo. Yes, I know that such things can be cleaned up in post-processing but I’m not very good at that sort of technological/software type stuff so I mostly tend to avoid it from the get go and seldom go over ISO 800 even though I could go to ISO 3200 on my camera. I take and post photos for myself, for social media, and my little blog, and have no real intention of selling them. Therefore making high resolution prints is not important to me and that’s why I keep it fairly simple. It’s good enough for my purposes.

I don’t always end up wandering into my scene to do further light painting of the garden plants in the background, but sometimes I do that too. This adds extra depth and dimensionality to the photo and it can work well in some circumstances. I did do that with some of these aurora photos including the one above and the next one below. The main thing when walking around in the scene with a light is to avoid showing the LED light bulb itself, which I do by keeping it close to my body and shielding it from the camera lens behind me. I also often try to not cast shadows in the process of doing this by staying in motion, although on occasion I let a shadow form by standing still, which can lend a cool ghostly quality to the scene if it’s called for. Which I feel usually it isn’t, so I don’t employ ghostly shadowing very regularly. Ditto that with using the red LED setting also present on my headlamp – a little red goes a long way in night photos, and the aurora was already providing an abundance of it, so I didn’t want to compete with the sky by artificially reddening things at ground level too. Well, truth be told I did use the red LED a couple of times and while the effect is nominally interesting for variance, I didn’t overuse it. For posterity let me show a couple anyway….

I didn’t actually intend to create this scene with any red LED in it at all, but since I have to cycle past red first to get to the various brightnesses of white later, I ended up introducing it into the photo anyway even though it was just a flash. To avoid this I need to do a better job of shielding the red with my hand until I get to white. Then, once I got to white and did a few seconds of light painting while trying to stay hidden behind the saguaro cactus, I ended up getting a shadow of my leg into the scene as well. These types of minor mistakes can actually sometimes improve a photo, and they are also kind of funny and act as a sort of tracker of my (failed) thought and execution processes.

Here’s another example of me accidentally adding red LED into the image by not properly hiding the bulb when I clicked past it to get to white. Even a quick flash gets picked up and added to the processing of the final image in the camera. And again I got ghostly shadows of my legs as well. Since both things were essentially mistakes and not planned, I didn’t like the effects or edit and post them. Not until I decided to dive deeper into explanations of how I conduct my creative process here did I think, or want, to add them to this blog post. But there are times when I DO want red LED or myself as a ghost in the photo, and those times the effect can be uniquely surreal.

Anyway, once a time exposure has been started I cannot interrupt it without ruining the photo, so I may as well just let the exposure and processing complete and see what I end up with. Once viewed on a bigger computer screen, I might like it or see elements that I didn’t expect. More often it ends up being saved but not adjusted or posted, and some of them are simply deleted. On this particular night I ended up making a total of 44 different time exposure images, and I’m keeping most of them after deleting a couple of blurry, unfocused ones. Out of the keeper photos I then post only a few of the best ones, or ones that tell part of whatever narrative I’m spinning.

Anyway, back to the original topic. After taking this scene a few paragraphs above the diversion into the light painting process, I moved the camera and tripod and took other compositions for a while. Then, at about 9:40 PM, I saw that the redness of the aurora had markedly intensified and was clearly visible to the naked eye without the technological assistance of a camera. There were about three patches of particularly strong coloration to the north, northeast, and east-northeast of my location. Not knowing how long this would last, I darted inside to tell a few people to step outside and look at it and then resumed my photography. I took several photos featuring the reddest part of the sky and then returned to retake this composition for comparison to what I’d done about 20 minutes before. The vivid colors lasted maybe 15 to 20 minutes and shifted around a bit before fading to the level I’d been seeing earlier in the evening. Anyone who was outside in the central or western USA at this particular time probably got their best photos during this brief, brilliant window of time.

I cannot tell for sure whether the red glow was amplified by being filtered through thin-high-altitude clouds, or whether this was just the actual color of the upper atmosphere. Perhaps a bit of both. The yellow glow on the horizon is from the lights of Kingman, Arizona illuminating lower-elevation clouds from beneath.

Here is one final photo of a view to the east down my driveway with plants off to the side. I wanted to include at least one image featuring a Joshua tree and this was the only one nearby that also had part of the aurora in it. I took a couple of others from different angles but I ended up liking this one the best. It serves the purpose.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures and learned something about the amazing northern lights that so many hear about, yet so few get to see without leaving home for the Great Frozen North!