This is a series of images showing a brief outburst of bright and structured aurora at the magnetic zenith overhead during the major storm of May 10/11, 2024. These were with a 7.5mm fish-eye lens taking in most of the sky for 360° scenes, and looking south at bottom. The Kp Index reached a high level of Kp8 (on a scale of 0 to 9) this night, bringing auroras to the southern U.S., a rare occurence.

The time between these 7 consecutive images is only 10 seconds, so this bright outburst did not last long (no more than a minute) before the aurora settled back into a more amorphous show of softer and dimmer vertical rays, still converging at the zenith but not as structured and not as bright. These 9-second-long exposures, taken with a gap of only one second between them, are from a time-lapse sequence of 700 frames.

Each is a 9-second exposure with the 7.5mm lens at f/2.8 on the Canon R5 at ISO 800. Taken from home in southern Alberta, at latitude 51º N.