Aurora, Orion, and the crescent moon

Last night the auro­ra data were decent, and the sky was clear and crisp, the stars shin­ing bright­ly. I packed up my gear and head­ed out.

The auro­ra hugged the hori­zon, but I got there just in time to catch a few pil­lars come and go. Maybe I should have gone to a spot with­out trees, but I like this par­tic­u­lar location.

I left that cam­era alone for about an hour and a half (except when I had to replace its bat­tery), and when I got home I assem­bled the pho­tos into a time­lapse video. One sec­ond of video is about one minute of real time.

While that was going on, I took a few pho­tos with my sec­ond cam­era of the cres­cent moon…

…and then put it on a tri­pod to get some shots of Ori­on with both my 50mm and my 24mm lenses.

While I don’t know if I’d have said it was red, the stars were sharp and crisp enough that I could see that Betel­geuse (the top-left star in Ori­on)^[1]Which is a red super­giant was a dif­fer­ent colour from the rest of them.

Here’s a crop from the 50mm pho­to of the sword, includ­ing the Ori­on nebula.

And here’s a hap­py mis­take: I messed up the focus on the 50mm lens just as I was start­ing to shoot Ori­on, so the stars are super blurred, but I kind of like the way it looks.

Around 11:30pm the auro­ra was fad­ing a bit, so I packed up and head­ed home.

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.