Night Shining Skies

Dear Ones,

How was your holiday weekend?

I had a literal blast with my family on the fourth. But first things first:

Solar flares were erupting frequently last week, and most of the ejections missed earth until Friday, July 3rd, when we were treated to a geomagnetic storm that increased in intensity throughout the day and managed to light up the night sky despite considerable cloudiness. To the unaided eye, it appeared as though the clouds were fringed with a line of glowing foam, as if they were waves breaking against an invisible atmospheric shore. In camera, the foam was green and yellow aurora.

In the span of two hours, the aurora and the clouds put on a constantly changing dramatic performance. Here are my favorites from the night.

The next night, July 4th, the fireworks aficionados who return to family cabins or rent VRBOs and Airbnbs along the shorelines for the weekend, launched hundreds of colorful rockets into the sky, as if trying to prove they could outdo Mother Nature. With my 240 mm lens and tripod setup, I was able to snap some images from across the water. Here are the best of the bunch, heavily cropped.

Okay, now back to my family fireworks. Have you seen the 2019 Netflix movie Poms starring Diane Keaton? In it, her character is making plans for end of life and decides to have her ashes made into fireworks. My husband thought it was a fabulous idea, and as he does, Googled to find companies that offered the service, only to find that no one did.

In August 2020 one of Kevin’s sister died. In August 2021, his other sister passed. Both sisters were cremated. We had their ashes. My husband wanted to launch them. And he is a DIY genius. Ashes adhere to spray glue. Spray glue adheres to fireworks. Baking sheets are useful if you want to roll on the ashes, though not necessary if you sprinkle directly over the bag of cremains from the funeral home. It takes only a teaspoon or so to coat a firework. Fireworks are legal in Washington for a limited time each year around July 4th, and on New Year’s Eve. So he sent his sisters flying.

After the first successful launch, it seems that memorial fireworks are now our family’s thing. Instead of spending the day thinking about all the ways our country has fallen short of its ideals and then lighting a random display without meaning, we now approach the day with purpose.

On July 4, 2025, Kevin’s widowed brother, whose wife died in 2024, launched her ashes and I photographed the event. The image of the first rocket lit in her memory was so perfectly framed, it felt like a greeting from beyond.

Our memorial expanded this year, now that my mom lives with us, to include the ashes of my grandma and stepdad she keeps. We celebrated the lives of ten loved ones since Kevin and his brother included all the beloved dead from their large family. Both parents are resting eternally in a mausoleum, both deceased brothers are buried, and the bulk of their sisters’ ashes are back in their native California, so they printed out small photos (on copy, not photo, paper) of the beloved dead and glued those to the fireworks.

Once again, I took photos perched from our second floor balcony. Logistics were a bit more challenging this year than last. Last year, we launched beginning at 9:55 p.m. and the landscape was beautifully lit in blue hour. This year, the tide was so high that we had no beach to launch from until 10:40 p.m. In the dark the landscape isn’t visible. The trail of the firework fuse is prominent in the photos. Some rockets look as though they’re on a string. And in the dark, the glow on the water is quite pronounced, sometimes looking as though the firework is touching it. And many of them appeared to explode lower than my eye level (and camera level). It’s a perspective I haven’t seen before.

I compiled a video of the 30 still images. It’s two minutes long and you can watch it here.

Thanks as always for listening to my late night activities. I hope you had a meaningful holiday.

-Cathy