Re: [APML] Quebec Aurora

[George Anderson <georgea@cam.org>]

Thanks Stan, Chris, Bruce and Tony.

The scans suffered from the flatbed scanner, any larger than what I
posted and all sorts of interesting "artifacts" started showing up. I
had cleaned the upper side of the platen to remove untold amounts of
fingerprints. After scanning the prints I found that when I started
adjusting the brightness and contrast just slightly, assorted
fingerprints would pop out of the scans. At some point one of our people
either had the platen off or the bottom open on the scanner and covered
the underside with about seven different fingerprints.
In the last ten months (since the november 5 aurora) we have had maybe
six good viewing days and I was commited to other activities those days.
I will definately add some 800 ASA film to my collection so that I can
get denser negatives and have a little more lattitude in photoshop and
more useful bits out of the scanner.
I am also starting to think that an all sky camera for auroral shots
might be worth a go up here. The last two aurora's where we had clear
skies the aurora ran horizon to horizon.
I am not sure over just how large an area the "coronal vortex" is
visible from the ground but from reports from co-workers it was offset
from where I saw it by about 5 to 10 degrees at a distance of 300 Km.

George Anderson
St Lazare Quebec

Clear skies and good health

Bruce Glagola wrote:
> 
> George,
> 
> Your shots are quite stunning.  Great work!
> 
> Bruce
> 
> George Anderson wrote:
> >
> > Saturday night myself and about 30 others drove to a dark sky site about
> > 4.5 hours north west of Montreal. The site is an inactive runway in the
> > La Verendrye Park and most had gone up to do some deep sky observing
> > while I planned on trying to get some widefield shots that were not in
> > the oblong blob catagory.
> > The shots were on Supra 400 with a 28mm lens at f/3.5 and the prints
> > were scanned with a flatbed scanner at work (my sprintscan should arrive
> > this week) which I have discovered someone has gotten a fingerprint on
> > the inside of the glass plate.
> > Results can be seen at http://www.cam.org/~georgea/Aurora.htm
> > The negatives are very much on the thin side, I hadn't realised how much
> > the light pollution from home helped sensitize the film on my exposures
> > last November 5th.
> > Longer exposures would have resulted in much greater blurring of the
> > auroral light. So although ISO 400 was good from removed
> > suburban/semi-rural house last year, I would go with ISO 800 when
> > shooting from a dark site.
> >
> > George Anderson
> > St. Lazare Quebec
> >
> > Clear skies and good health
> >
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