01/20/2026
As per my last post, I just got back from Borrego Springs / Salton Sea and then I saw all these news articles about a possible solar magnetic storm that was going to hit G4 (severe) last night. Apparently we are in a peak of a 12 year cycle and there aren't many opportunities to see or photograph this so I drove back out to the wildflowers in Anza-Borrego. Also the dune evening primrose are at peak and I didn't get a shot of them on the weekend, so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone.
I found a pretty nice cluster of primrose after wandering around for an hour and setup to photograph that. They form these amazing circles with a ring of flowers on the outside. However, I couldn't see the aurora with the naked eye last night. So I thought I missed it completely. However, when I got back home and edited the photos, I was able to faintly see the aurora colors and edited the photos to make it more prominent. So it's definitely brighter than it was and I'm sure the colors are off a bit compared to if you could actually measure it with a spectrophotometer. Plus there was a lot of light pollution from palm springs that I had to remove.
Anyway, I'm glad I went even though it was a lot of hours in the car. Got a chance to meetup with some more friends in the middle of the night and have coffee and homemade apple pie (thanks Bryan!).
