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.
aurora
Aurora, March 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.
Clouded Aurora
After I watched the new Top Gun talkie, I checked the data in my aurora app while I was still in the parking lot. It looked good[1]The Bz reading was ‑11, where the further into the negative, the better; I usually see a decent show if it’s at ‑4 or so., so I hurried home, grabbed my gear, and went out of town.
Unfortunately it was cloudy to the north. I set up anyway, hoping the clouds would move off, and started snapping photos.
Long story short: the clouds didn’t move off. I gave it about 45 minutes, and then packed up and went home.
Here’s a timelapse of about 20 minutes’ worth of my attempts. Each frame is a 10-second exposure.
And here’s a handful of my favourites from the photos I got. (I think I caught a meteor in the first one, on the far left.)
Footnotes
| ↑1 | The Bz reading was ‑11, where the further into the negative, the better; I usually see a decent show if it’s at ‑4 or so. |
|---|
Aurora at the end of March
The aurora data looked good and the sky was clear, so I packed up my camera—grabbing, at the last minute, my 50mm lens, thinking I’d maybe get some shots of Orion with it—and headed out to find a dark spot.
10 minutes northwest of town, I stopped on the side of a gravel road and got set up. There was a faint haze to the north which, to the camera, was green (my eye saw it as grey). The data showed that there should be a bit more activity in about a half hour, so I started snapping photos. Initially I was taking photos at 10 second exposures. As the night wore on I dropped that to 5 seconds, then 2.5 and finally 2. (I took a few frames at 1 second with my f/1.8 lens, but they were a little darker than I like.)
Here’s the results.
It was even visible in town, if you knew what you were looking at. This photo was taken on my street, just before I went back in the house.
Added: I took a few photos for a panorama to show how wide the show was. This stretches from the west to the east; the road visible on the far left and the far right is, in fact, the same road.
Some faint aurora
It’s been a while since I went out chasing aurora. Tonight the clouds stayed away, and the temperature, while chilly, didn’t feel like it was going to kill me. I got a couple shots of the aurora, faint and hugging the northern horizon…
…and also an hour or so’s worth of star trails, including what looks like an iridium flare. (It looks like my camera moved at some point early in the hour. I didn’t jostle it; maybe the wind shifted it slightly.)
Favourite images, 2021
Some of my best photos (well, in my opinion) of the year that was.
Continue reading “Favourite images, 2021”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.)
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?
Aurora, April 16, 2021
Last night I took a drive, and got some shots of a diffuse aurora borealis on a back road a few miles outside of town.
I shot for about ½ hour between 11 and 11:30 pm, and made a short timelapse video, too. Each second of video is about a minute in real-time.
And then, when I came back to town, I decided to get a few shots of the old Kullbergs warehouse demolition going on at 18th Street and Pacific Avenue. The photo below is an HDR merge of two photos, to try to balance the brightness of the exterior with the darkness of the interior.
Aurora, March 31, 2021
To the eye it was a faint haze to the northern horizon.