Part-time prevaricator
Last night was clear, so I went out to see if I could catch any of the Perseids. I saw a half-dozen, but I only caught one bright one on camera.
That’s OK, though; there was plenty for me to take photos of.
I was out in the dark for a couple hours, and it was worth it.
My first time shooting with two cameras. It was a good show, even with hazy skies and a full moon rising.
And I made a timelapse of over 1,000 of the frames I shot last night, too.
It was a lovely night for the aurora. It’s too bad I was standing next to my car, broken down on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, while I watched it.
Thanks to my lovely wife Kathleen who came and rescued me, and kept me company while we waited on a tow truck.
Nerdy details: all the photos were taken at 11mm, 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200 and edited (lightly) in GIMP. The panorama at the top is 3 photos stitched together with Hugin
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.
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”
One of my photos from the March 23rd aurora was the cover photo for this week’s Westman This Week section of the Brandon Sun.
I think that’s pretty neat.
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.
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.
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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