photography

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.