Pinedale photographer Dave Bell knew the coronal mass ejections (CMEs)\u00a0\u2014 the solar phenomenon that creates colorful auroras \u2014\u00a0incoming on Tuesday was going to be a good one, so he rushed to the Seven Mile River Ranch between Daniel and Pinedale to see the show.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What unfolded overhead was what Bell called “the best (aurora) I’ve ever seen.”<\/p>\n
“What impressed me was the width and breadth of the lights,” he said. “They stretched 180 degrees, north to south, across the sky. You’d look straight up, and there was a big white cloud that had formed overhead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“In the camera’s eyes, it was brilliant green. It encompassed the entire sky.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
From a high bluff overlooking the river, Bell used two cameras to take more than 840 photographs of the red and green skies overhead. The reflection from the water and silhouetted cottonwood trees made it “an unbelievable vantage point” for his shots.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Boy, did Mother Nature ever give us a show last night,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bell wasn\u2019t the only Wyomingite to notice the intense and widespread aurora. Hundreds of social media posts have shown off the Northern Lights, including a handful of sheriff\u2019s offices parking their patrol cars under them.<\/p>\n
The Best Yet<\/p>\n
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) issued\u00a0a Geomagnetic Storm Watch on Tuesday<\/a>\u00a0after two CMEs erupted from the surface of the sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe had two CMEs that were released from the sun 48 to 72 hours ago,\u201d Jan Curtis, a retired meteorologist and former Wyoming State climatologist, told Cowboy\u00a0State\u00a0Daily on Wednesday. \u201cWhen multiple CMEs arrive at the same time, they have an amplifying effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It’s not just one after another. It actually doubles or triples the intensity of each CME because of the way they overlap and interact with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n The amplified auroras were so intense that they reached from the North Pole to cover almost all of the Lower 48.<\/p>\n “From the last I saw, the aurora was seen in 45 states,” said Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day. “That’s pretty significant.”\u00a0<\/p>\n By the time the CMEs reached Earth, they were moving at 4.4 million mph and had intensified into a Severe G4 geomagnetic storm. For reference on how intense that is,\u00a0the SWPC’s scale peaks at G5<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The combined CMEs were so powerful that they were seen as far south as Mexico. It was easily the most intense geomagnetic storm of 2025 and one of the most intense in the last several\u00a0years.\u00a0<\/p>\n “This one rivaled the one we had in May 2024, which was pretty remarkable,” Day said. “It was a spectacular show.”\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Curtis, Tuesday night\u2019s auroras happened under similar circumstances to the ones that\u00a0appeared over Wyoming in May 2024<\/a>, when multiple CMEs amplified each other. Atmospheric conditions were also favorable and added to the intensity.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a nice trio of indices,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was a lot of density in the solar winds, which means there were a lot of particles to excite in our atmosphere.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We also had negative Bz, which basically means the Earth\u2019s magnetic field embraced the solar winds rather than repulsing them. That caused them to fall further into the Earth’s atmosphere.”<\/p>\n Curtis said the May 2024 event is still the largest CME event of the current solar cycle, but Tuesday night was a very close second.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a G5, but it had all the hallmarks of becoming one,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Snakes, Streaks, And Arcs\u00a0<\/p>\n From her home in Bar Nunn, photographer Laura Redmond was monitoring the CMEs as soon as they collided with Earth’s atmosphere. She knew it was going to be a night to remember before sunset.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I had been monitoring the numbers all day,” she said. “By 4:30 p.m., I called all my friends and told them to get their stuff ready. By 6 p.m., I could see them in town with the naked eye.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Redmond rushed out to “the middle of nowhere,” specifically\u00a0Poison Spider Road west of Casper. She started shooting at 7 p.m. and kept shooting until after midnight.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It was pretty phenomenal,” she said. “I saw things that I hadn’t seen before.”<\/p>\n Redmond saw several Stable Aurora Red (SAR) arcs streaking across the sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n They were moving at different speeds, creating an ever-changing tapestry of vibrant reds and pinks overhead with streaks of green, white, and purple on the periphery.\u00a0<\/p>\n “One of the things that I saw that I hadn’t seen before was a ribbon right on the edge of the aurora,” she said. “It looked like a snake, moving pretty fast through the sky, and that was fun to watch.”\u00a0<\/p>\n She also saw a unique auroral phenomenon called a “picket fence.”\u00a0<\/p>\n