Part-time prevaricator
I caught some more northern lights last night.
The brightest part of the show didn’t last very long, but I let my cameras snap away for a bit less than an hour, and put together a time-lapse video. One second of video is one minute of real time; there’s a cut about ¾ of the way through the video, from camera 1 to camera 2.
I left the house last night around 11:30pm and headed south by southeast, looking for a nice dark spot to get some Milky Way photos. I got set up on a gravel road about 3 miles east of the junction of Highways #10 and #2, and started snapping. Here are some of the shots I liked the most.
I had intended to take an hour’s worth of photos, but my camera battery died after about 47 minutes and I didn’t notice for a while (I was reading in the car). Oh well, so it goes. Here’s the 47 minutes compressed into a few seconds’ worth of timelapse video.
Then, as I was leaving, I noticed the moon was setting over a small pond, so I got a shot of that, too.
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.
The sky was blue for the first time in a few days—we’ve been getting wildfire smoke—so I got about an hour’s worth of clouds and condensed it to 60 seconds for all of you.
I can’t recall ever going for a bike ride in November before, but today I went 10 km after work, before the sun set.
I got home just in time to set my camera up on the deck, on the tripod, and snap 200+ frames for a quick timelapse of the sunset.
I made a timelapse video of the clouds while we were at the farm last weekend. It’s about an hour, with photos snapped every 10 seconds.
And since it turned out so well, I did another one yesterday, out my upstairs window. Longer this time—there are about 4½ hours of clouds in this one.
Taken on a side road just off Highway #10, about 15 minutes south of my house, at about 1:30 AM.
14 photos, each 25 seconds, 3200 ISO, 11mm, f/2.8. Stitched with Hugin.
96 images in the timelapse above, each one 25 seconds @ 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 3200. The video took almost an hour to shoot, and, at 10 frames per second, lasts about 10 seconds.
