Published on Show Me Mizzou Aug. 27, 2024
Story by Blaire Leible Garwitz, MA ’06
It wasn’t just black and gold at Mizzou on May 10; it was also chartreuse, magenta, crimson, lavender and sapphire blue, thanks to the rare appearance of northern lights in the skies above Columbia. The lights (also known as the aurora borealis) usually appear only in northern latitudes, but an extreme solar storm caused them to be visible much further south on that date.
Photographer Scott Schaefer, BJ ’04, captured a beautiful image of the northern lights over Mizzou’s columns. “Being able to view this spectacular sight was pretty awesome,” he says. “The lights looked like a vertical cloud with a hint of pink to the naked eye, but my camera was able to pull up a much more vibrant and colorful sky because I used a longer exposure to photograph it.”
Using a 14-millimeter ultra wide-angle lens, Schaefer had to shoot the columns image in two photos: a 15-second exposure for the sky and a normal exposure for the bright foreground elements. He also needed to combine the two images. “Cameras just can’t capture the wide range of exposures there with all the bright lights on the columns and then the northern lights in the sky like our eyes can,” he says.
To view all of his breathtaking northern lights photos, visit Schaefer Photography’s website at shop.schaeferpix.com/portfolio.
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