Part-time prevaricator
The aurora data looked pretty decent last night, but I was tired. So I set up a camera in the spare bedroom, pointed east, and let it click away.
I ended up with 3000+ images in a bit over 4 hours. The timelapse video below is, as usual, 60× normal speed, so that 1 second of video is 1 minute of real time.
In case you slept through my Saturday morning interview with Shannah-Lee Vidal—or you’re not in CBC Manitoba’s broadcast area—here’s how the story went.
I left the house last night around 11:30pm and headed south by southeast, looking for a nice dark spot to get some Milky Way photos. I got set up on a gravel road about 3 miles east of the junction of Highways #10 and #2, and started snapping. Here are some of the shots I liked the most.
I had intended to take an hour’s worth of photos, but my camera battery died after about 47 minutes and I didn’t notice for a while (I was reading in the car). Oh well, so it goes. Here’s the 47 minutes compressed into a few seconds’ worth of timelapse video.
Then, as I was leaving, I noticed the moon was setting over a small pond, so I got a shot of that, too.
The aurora data were pretty meh last night, but I went out anyway and got some shots of the Milky Way climbing in the east. The video is the better part of an hour’s images, all shot at 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 3200.
I caught a bit of a show last night, from 10pm to about 11pm.
Edit: Hey look, I’m on the radio! (On the 95.1 CHVN website, at any rate.)
The sky was blue for the first time in a few days—we’ve been getting wildfire smoke—so I got about an hour’s worth of clouds and condensed it to 60 seconds for all of you.
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.
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.
I can’t recall ever going for a bike ride in November before, but today I went 10 km after work, before the sun set.
I got home just in time to set my camera up on the deck, on the tripod, and snap 200+ frames for a quick timelapse of the sunset.