Part-time prevaricator
I know, I know, I live in Canada. But every spring I get fooled into thinking that maybe the snow’s done now till next winter.
Still. At least it’s an opportunity to showcase one of my favourite graphs.
(The header image is actually about 40 images, stacked using the same method I use for my star trails.)
Tonight I headed out into the countryside, planning to take some startrail photos. The data weren’t looking good for any aurora.
Some showed up all the same. (What I saw was a very faint haze; the camera sees far better in the dark than I do.)
The northern lights put on a show again tonight.
I reprocessed one of the photos. Which one do you prefer?
[twenty20 img1=“4704” img2=“4710” before=“before” after=“after”]
About ½ hour of rotation.
“And yet it moves,” as Galileo is alleged to have said, though the story is probably apocryphal.
The star trails in the photo and the videos all involve 70 frames, 30 seconds each, at 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600. The Milky Way is faint, but it’s there.
You tired of these? Because I’m not.
It was warm enough that I stayed outside of the car and watched the show. To the naked eye—to my naked eye, at least—the aurora weren’t as bright green as they appear in the photos; more like a dull paleness in the sky. But you could see motion and structure in them, which isn’t always the case.
If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
[twenty20 img1=“4671” img2=“4672”]
Nerdy details: All shot at 50mm, f/1.8, varying shutter speeds.
On the see-it-before-it’s-gone flank of the Kullbergs’ warehouse, corner of 18th Street and Pacific Avenue.
About midnight last night, after I got home from getting half an hour of chilly star trails (and charged up the batteries the cold killed), I checked the space-weather app on my phone. It told me I had a strong chance of seeing some aurora if I left like right now.
So I did, and between about 12:15 and 1 AM, I got almost 400 photos of northern lights.
And I made all 393 photos into a 30-second timelapse, too. (Every second of video represents a minute of real time.)
Nerdy details: each photo is a 5‑second exposure, 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600. The photos were edited for brightness/contrast; the frames in the video are all straight-out-of-camera.
Shot from our deck.