More Aurora...

[jsecordphoto]

Another showing of the Northern Lights here in New England last night, albeit a brief one. Peak color and activity only lasted maybe 20-30 minutes, but it flared up more than I had expected. I tried out Lightroom's new photomerge feature for this, did a pretty good job. 6 vertical frames at 24mm, ISO6400, f2.8, 15 seconds each.

 

[Woodsman]

Lovely

 

[jsecordphoto]

Lovely

Thanks!

 

[TCampbell]

Beautiful rich color, nice stars, and I love the silhouetted tree line with the reflection of it all in the calm water.

 

[jsecordphoto]

Beautiful rich color, nice stars, and I love the silhouetted tree line with the reflection of it all in the calm water.

much appreciated! This is kind of my "safe" spot if there is the potential for Aurora. Half an hour from my house, hop out of the car and shoot. There isn't a ton to work with foreground-wise but it's a nice dark spot nearby, I just didn't expect the aurora to be this strong!

 

[WesternGuy]

Very nice the tree line, the reflections in the water - great choice locations. I went out last night after getting a yellow alert from the Aurora Watch folks up north, but the skies were too cloudy to see anything. Glad to see that somebody was able to capture these.

WesternGuy

 

[TCampbell]

Beautiful rich color, nice stars, and I love the silhouetted tree line with the reflection of it all in the calm water.

much appreciated! This is kind of my "safe" spot if there is the potential for Aurora. Half an hour from my house, hop out of the car and shoot. There isn't a ton to work with foreground-wise but it's a nice dark spot nearby, I just didn't expect the aurora to be this strong!

It's interesting that you say this. In the astronomy club, we (of course) go out in search of these things if we've had any hint of a CME from the Sun headed our way (spaceweather.com will tell you). But we have had nights when astronomers went out... saw NOTHING, but they were imaging the sky for other objects... only to get their images off the camera and realize they had a strange background glow in the images -- that turned out to be auroras.

The color-sensitive "cones" in our human eyes won't detect color unless there's a high enough amount of light to activate them (and that gets worse as we get older -- oh, the things I wish I had done more often when I was younger.) But they show up quite nicely in the camera.

It doesn't surprise me that it looks stronger in your image than you were able to observe in real-life. I'd say that's pretty normal.

 

[jsecordphoto]

Beautiful rich color, nice stars, and I love the silhouetted tree line with the reflection of it all in the calm water.

much appreciated! This is kind of my "safe" spot if there is the potential for Aurora. Half an hour from my house, hop out of the car and shoot. There isn't a ton to work with foreground-wise but it's a nice dark spot nearby, I just didn't expect the aurora to be this strong!

It's interesting that you say this. In the astronomy club, we (of course) go out in search of these things if we've had any hint of a CME from the Sun headed our way (spaceweather.com will tell you). But we have had nights when astronomers went out... saw NOTHING, but they were imaging the sky for other objects... only to get their images off the camera and realize they had a strange background glow in the images -- that turned out to be auroras.

The color-sensitive "cones" in our human eyes won't detect color unless there's a high enough amount of light to activate them (and that gets worse as we get older -- oh, the things I wish I had done more often when I was younger.) But they show up quite nicely in the camera.

It doesn't surprise me that it looks stronger in your image than you were able to observe in real-life. I'd say that's pretty normal.

Yeah, every time I share a photo of the Aurora online I get people asking me why they didn't see anything the night before. Or, when they announce a potential for a big solar storm, I'll see a bunch of people sitting in their cars at some of the more popular spots with good views north- wondering why they aren't seeing super visible Aurora dancing overhead like in Norway or Alaska. I've seen visible light pillars here once it hits KP 6+, but the only time I've seen any visible color and clearly defined movement is last month when it hit kp8