The aurora forecast did not disappoint, and I arrived on top of Loveland Pass at 7:22 PM, the second car to park (two hours later it was like a city up there!). Even though it was still twilight, even the iPhone’s camera could see abundant pink and green colors in the sky. Within 20 minutes the show really started, but a diffuse cloud cover seemed to cast a veil on the brightest pillars and curtains of the night, which occurred just after 8PM. At 8:11 PM the sky brightened significantly, illuminating the landscape in an eery glow from above, even casting light into the shadows cast by the 53.7% waxing moon. An auroral arc could be witnessed as a wide band of pink traversing from north to south, across the zenith directly overhead.
This aurora event was seen throughout the central U.S., down south as far as TX, rivaling the aurora witnessed back in May.
A 330° panorama captured near the peak of the pillars:
Auroral arc component images (still need to compile these 14mm images into a panorama). This band of pink was visible the entire time I was up there (~4 hours), and stayed in the same place. The center of the arc appeared exactly at 180° azimuth (moon was 14° above the horizon at 213°):
And here is how quickly the colors were changing at the height of the geomagnetic storm; these are sequential pano frames captured ~20 seconds apart, moving from NE to SE. Note the two end frames and how pink everything become, while the three frames in between were quite greenish (this is about 0:07 into the video); this sequence cannot be used for a panorama, as the colors don’t ‘match up’:
