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.
Videos
The Milky Way, just off Hwy 2
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 Milky Way on the long weekend
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.
Aurora, Nov. 3, 2021
I caught a bit of a show last night, from 10pm to about 11pm.
At the research station, in town
Edit: Hey look, I’m on the radio! (On the 95.1 CHVN website, at any rate.)
Clouds
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.
Yet another aurora post
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.
The late show
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.
Sunset after a bike ride
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.