Part-time prevaricator
The aurora data looked pretty decent last night, but I was tired. So I set up a camera in the spare bedroom, pointed east, and let it click away.
I ended up with 3000+ images in a bit over 4 hours. The timelapse video below is, as usual, 60× normal speed, so that 1 second of video is 1 minute of real time.
As I was going to bed last night, I took a look out the window. The forecast had said it was supposed to be partly cloudy overnight, but the sky looked pretty clear. I set up a camera in the spare room, pointed out the window, and let it snap away. I figured I’d get some star trails out of it if nothing else.
The aurora decided to make an appearance. It was just getting ramped up when my camera battery died around 2:30am, but I got a couple good shots out of it.
Oh, and the star trails turned out pretty good, too. They’re at the top, and are taken from about the first hour and a half of the evening.
The video below is the full two hours and thirty-six minutes, but it runs at 60x so that one second of video is one minute of real[1]Whatever that might mean, relativistically. time.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Whatever that might mean, relativistically. |
|---|
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.
