Re: [APML] Auroral activity over New Mexico

[Jerry Lodriguss <jml@astropix.com>]

>
>   Any results with your aurora shots yet.


Hi , yes, I got the film back late this afternoon.

Compared to the visual display, the picture was, naturally, not even close.

I chose to frame a couple of houses in the foreground with Orion the left 
one, and the setting crescent moon on the right, with part of the Aurora 
dominating the top right of the picture, shot with a 24mm.

What makes it interesting to me is that its' shot from the sidewalk in 
front of my house in an urban area of 8 million people,  and it's looking 
south!

I had been very sick all week, and had to cancel plans to attend the 
DelMarVa Star Gaze, so I was pretty bummed out. I was sitting with a friend 
talking in my living room and we turned out all the lights so we could 
pretend we were out camping. Out of the front window I watched as the sky 
slowly darkened after sunset, and then at about 8:30 I suddenly noticed 
this funny red color to the sky up high in the northeast.  Since there was 
still some twilight left, I at first thought it was just some very high 
clouds illuminated by the light of  the fading red sunset, but the red 
color was really weird. I said "Woa, what's THAT?" and my friend, Lane 
Davis, who has experienced many aurora looked and immediately said 
"Aurora!"  If we had been sitting there with the lights on, like normal 
people, we would never have seen it!

Yippee!  We ran outside, and quite a display was going on.

Deep red patches in the east through Ursa Major, in the south through Canis 
Major and Orion and across the southern horizon through the setting moon 
and Saturn.

There were also "detached" blue patches and blue/green fingers roughly
radiating up from the north.

I ran inside to get the camera and tripod, fumbled around to find 
everything and got back outside and set up, Shot 10 frames on PJM, 
bracketing at 5, 10, 20, and 30 seconds at f/2.8. The aurora was recorded 
even on the 5 second exposures.

Then the spectacular part of the display suddenly ended, and the fainter, 
but still very large areas remained for a while longer.  Unfortunately, I 
didn't catch any of the spectacular stuff on film.

I won't have access to a scanner until next week, when I get the photo 
scanned I'll post it to my web page and let you know.

Phew!  What a sight!

Jerry

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