Part-time prevaricator
Last night, Kathleen said to me, “I hear the aurora should be good tonight.” I checked the app on my phone that shows me the aurora data. Everything looked pretty good except the Bz value, which was about +17. (For a good show, you want the Bz to be negative. The longer it’s been negative, the better.)
Continue reading “Aurora, April 23, 2023”
Wow, that was a show.
The data looked ridiculous from the outset. There’s one parameter, when you’re consulting the oracle (sorry, the space-weather data), the Bz, that you want to be a negative number. I’ve seen great shows when the Bz was around ‑3 or ‑5. The longer it’s negative, the better.
Yesterday afternoon, every time I checked, the Bz was around ‑15. Crazy.
And the auroral oval looked like this. When it’s yellow, that’s usually a good sign. Red—that much red—is flat-out amazing.
Photos from my back lane, March 3rd, 2023, a couple days after Jupiter and Venus’ conjunction.
Jupiter’s moons (top left to lower right) Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa are visible in the full-size image. (Io is too close to Jupiter to be visible here.)
There was less cloud cover tonight. It was still cold and windy out in the countryside though.
It was worth it, though, I’d say.
The aurora forecast was good. The cloud forecast was not. But I ventured out anyway, just to see if there was anything worth seeing.
In short: Yes, but it would have been even better on a cloudless night.
To the eye it was a faint grey haze. The camera got a little more colour, at least till the batteries died.
I went out to see if I could get any photos of C/2022 E3 (ZTF) tonight, but the moon is far, far too bright. It was kind of a relief, honestly; it’s ridiculously cold tonight (like, pushing ‑30°C before the wind gets factored in). I snapped a couple photos, but I couldn’t see anything resembling a comet in them.
It wasn’t nearly as successful an attempt as the last time I went comet chasing.
The moon tonight is very full and very bright, and there’s a tiny little speck of light juuuuuust about touching it. I checked and it turns out it’s Mars.
(I realize I kind of gave it away in the title. So it goes.)
[Edit] I just realized it’s also the 50th anniversary today of the launch of Apollo 17, the last crewed mission to the moon. Here’s to the continued success of the Artemis project and the return of humans to the lunar surface.
We went down to Boissevain on the weekend to help out with the Dunrea Flea Market[1]It rather outgrew the available space in Dunrea., and stayed over at our friends’ farmhouse a few miles south of town. There were a few shows put on by the Northern Lights that night; I caught one of them. They danced for about 20 minutes while I watched. Here are some of the photos I got.
I tried to capture a panorama, to show just how much of the sky was involved. Unfortunately my image-stitching program balked at creating a panorama; the aurora were moving too much for the software to find similarities in the photos. I manually aligned them instead.
And I did up a quick timelapse. The 33 seconds of video represents about 33 minutes of photos, each one a 5‑second exposure.
When the show was winding down, I turned around and saw that the Milky Way was high above the farm. One more photo, I thought, then I’ll go inside.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | It rather outgrew the available space in Dunrea. |
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My friend Tim was camping at Wasagaming, as is his wont on the September long weekend. I went to visit on Friday evening.
We headed up to Spruces to check out the sunset…
…and the moon.
Later, the galaxy appeared as the moon set.
And I decided to try to catch Jupiter with my 55–250mm lens, which is usually too shaky at 250mm. It seems to have worked. (If I’m reading this right, the moons are, L‑R, Callisto, Europa, and Io.)
After I dropped Tim off at his campsite, I saw that the aurora were making an appearance. I stopped in a few places (the beach in Wasagaming[1]Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach, the dock on the golf course road, and on the roadside on #10 highway).
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach |
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