Aurora at Wolf Park

Digital Moonrise photo taken with 300mm Tamron lens, 1/80 sec f5.6 ISO 250

In early November there was a coronal mass ejection - um, the sun burped. Hurtling through space and slamming into the Earth's magnetic field we ended up with quite the show. A really cool Aurora Borealis as far south as Lafayette, Indiana. Unfortunately we missed it. However, the next night several us stood outside watching a faintly red sky and I took my first nighttime photos with my D1x digital camera and new 20mm lens.

November 5th was quite the show which you can see at this really cool page. They predicted another Aurora strong enough to see here in Indiana on the 6th which we actually did hear about. There was a distinct glow along the northern horizon so I got the D1x out and my new 20 mm lens. I was able to get a few long exposures which worked out fairly well. They are much reduced from the 3008x1960 image size which would have been painful to post or download....

I also played around and took some photos of the moon rising through the trees. I only noticed all the cobwebs in the trees after I looked at the photos on my computer screen. I also included an unreduced, but heavily cropped image of the rising moon.

Then I took a photo of Orion rising over the giftshop. That was a 15 second exposure at F2.8 on my Nikkor 20mm lens.

All but the moonrise photos were taken with the ISO set to 3200 for maximum exposure. Even then I needed exposures of up to 30 seconds which created a number of artifacts on the images. However, these do not show up on the reduced images which was nice.

Holly was interested in the Pleiades so I got my 300 and pointed it there. The exposure is only 10 seconds long, but that was long enough to see start trails.

Well, it was not much of a show tonight, but fun all the same. I just wish we had been out the night before for that was quite spectacular. Oh well.

As a final thing, I made a special Wolfpaper for www.wolfpaper.pl with an Indiana Aurora in the background and a recent Howlnight photo of Tristan and Marion.