October 30, 2003, northeastern New York state - The e-mail from www.spaceweather.com today said:
"A severe geomagnetic storm is in progress on Oct. 30th. It began at
approximately 1700 UT when a coronal mass ejection (CME) struck our
planet's magnetic field--the second such impact in as many days. The CME
was hurled toward Earth yesterday by an X10-class explosion from giant
sunspot 486. Sky watchers at all latitudes should be alert for auroras
after local nightfall."

For a change, we had beautifully clear skies in the evening, and by 6:45 pm EST it was dark enough to take a look. The rays were pale at first, but it was obvious that we were going to see some colors. Over the next half hour it developed nicely, with rays and bands of color in areas from the northwest to the east.

All of these photos were shot with an Olympus C2040Z, which has manual controls. It was set for maximum exposure - 16 seconds, f1.8 aperture, and focused on infinity; the ISO setting was left at 100. No editing was done, except to resize the photos to 800x600 and remove four bright spots caused by bad pixels in the camera (because they looked like stars!). Unfortunately there is some distortion due to the JPEG compression process, as they were shot at less than the highest available quality setting.

Here's a very important note - the colors in these photos are much deeper and more evident than what we actually saw. The camera has been very good in low light situations, and apparently with the long exposure it picked up a lot more of the colors. Wish we could have seen it like this, but it's a pleasure to have the photos to enjoy.