The sky was that weird evening colour that could be perfectly clear or could be a solid wall of cloud. But the moon showed me it wasn’t cloud.
Crescent moon
astrophotography
Better, or worse?
I took a stab a re-editing a photo of the aurora I took in 2016. It’s a lot more dramatic now. What do you think?
Birthday Photos
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.)
I caught a satellite over about 40 frames 
~20 minutes of star trails 
The half-moon
Star trails at the research station
About ½ hour of rotation.
Eppur si muove
“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.
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.
Half a moon
Shot from our deck.
Star Trails
Warmer than it’s been, but still cold enough to kill two camera batteries inside the space of ½ an hour. I gave up on seeing any aurora and headed home to process what I got.
Update: As it turned out, I got some aurora after all.
About 170 photos, 5 seconds each (for a total of about 15 minutes of rotation), ISO 1600, 11mm, f/2.8.
Orion
Half-moon
There’s half a moon in the sky tonight. I snapped some quick photos from my deck. It’s a bit chilly so I didn’t spend much time out there.
Nerdy details: 1/100 second exposure, ISO 100, 250mm, f/5.6, handheld. Photo was cropped and the colours tweaked a little bit in GIMP.