See ‘magical’ bioluminescent tides coincide with meteor shower along Oregon coast

Photos taken on the Oregon coast show a wonderland of glowing tides, wheeling stars and a falling meteor.

“Magical scenes from a fairy tale,” photographer Jay Shah called them in an email interview with McClatchy News.

One photo shows bioluminescent tides around Arch Rock in southern Oregon with stars wheeling in the night sky, captured by a long exposure, Shah said.

Another shows the glowing tides, a shipwreck, the Milky Way and a falling meteor from the Perseid shower at Fort Stevens State Park, he said.

“The magical bioluminescence sparkled all around our boots!” Shah said. Both photos and other photographs are on his Instagram page at @shutterbug_shah.

Born in Mumbai, India, Shah moved to Oregon from Ohio in 2014 and fell in love with photography during the 2017 total solar eclipse. He’s a General Electric employee.

“I really enjoy capturing the Milky Way galaxy in front of cool landscapes; the resulting images are called nightscapes,” Shah said. “I also enjoy shooting landscapes, birds, frogs, and trees.”

He does not use composite images, preferring the “challenge of getting good single exposure images as truer representations of the landscapes,” Shah said.

Bioluminescent tides are caused by dinoflagellates, microscopic organisms that produce an electric neon glow at night as a defense mechanism, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said.

This story was originally published August 16, 2023 at 2:52 PM with the headline "See ‘magical’ bioluminescent tides coincide with meteor shower along Oregon coast."