northern lights

Well, it hap­pened again.

As usu­al, in the time­lapse below, one sec­ond of video is one minute of real time.

Thanks, Neal, for show­ing me a new spot, and for hang­ing out in the dark with me for an hour or so.

It was clear to the west, so I grabbed my cam­era and took a chance.

It was not clear to the north.

Once I got home, the sky to the east was clear. I set up a cam­era in our spare room, aimed due east, and let it click until the bat­ter­ies died. Between 11:30pm and 2:30am it got these gems, plucked from almost 2000 frames.

These pho­tos, I have to keep remind­ing myself, were tak­en inside the city. Nor­mal­ly I’m hap­py when I get light like this a few kilo­me­tres out of town, where it’s start­ing to get prop­er­ly dark. These auro­ra were com­pet­ing with street­lights, and winning.

Oh yeah, I also turned the 2000ish pho­tos from the spare room into a timelapse.

This is not an every­day^[1]Everynight. view from my back yard.

…or my upstairs bedroom.

Were the north­ern lights out last night? Yes.

Was I out last night? Also yes.

A few days ago, the sun launched like 5 CMEs our way. This nat­u­ral­ly excit­ed all the auro­ra nerds, myself includ­ed^[1]I charged all my cam­era bat­ter­ies and tried to keep my expec­ta­tions tem­pered..

CMEs are the usu­al cause of auro­ras, and when you get more than one at a time, the auro­ra show is usu­al­ly going to be more intense. So when night fell and the data was^[2]were still look­ing intense^[3]The KP index, for exam­ple, was between 7 and 9, its max­i­mum; most of the real­ly intense shows I’ve seen were at KP6 or so, I packed my gear and head­ed west of the city to one of the spot I like to use for auro­ra photos.

I arrived with day­light still fad­ing and start­ed set­ting up. There was anoth­er car near­by; they, too, were there to watch the show.

Here’s the first shot I got, unedit­ed except for straight­en­ing and crop­ping. Even in the twi­light you can see the purple/pinkish lines of aurora.

As it got dark, the lights got brighter. I had two DSLRs run­ning, and I snapped a few pho­tos with my phone, too. Appar­ent­ly my new phone has a bet­ter cam­era than the old one, or else it’s bet­ter at post-pro­cess­ing, because those shots were pret­ty good if I do say so myself.

I was there from about 10:15pm till just around mid­night. My friend Neal came for a vis­it, and there were about 3 or 4 oth­er cars that showed up on the stretch of road, too.

OK, enough talk­ing; here are the pho­tos. All the DSLR pho­tos were tak­en at 5 sec­ond expo­sures, ape­ture f/2.8 or f/1.8 on the 50mm lens^[4]ie, as wide open as the lens­es would shoot, ISO 1600. The phone pho­tos were tak­en on night mode, using what­ev­er auto­mat­ic set­tings the phone decid­ed would work best.

First up: the DSLRs.

And here are the pho­tos from my phone.

And a cou­ple of time-lapse videos. In each video, 1 sec­ond is 1 minute of real time.