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Latest sunset and Aurora…


WWDarkdiz

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20 hours ago, WWSandMan said:

Great images, Diz! FYI, Meghan and I are coming your way one weekend when the solar flares are hot, and you're ready for company. I need a stamp in my passport anyway... 

You are MOST CERTAINLY welcome, I'm free all next summer (closing her down in a week or so)!  Bring a spare liver, you'll need it 😉

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  • 2 weeks later...

That's just effing AWESOME!

 

~~~

 

Saturday night/Sunday morning, for some dumb reason I was still up at nearly 2am. Meghan tells me her phone was blowing up with push-notifications from her aurora apps and that I ought to go see what I can see. She tried to get me to go for a drive somewhere out of town to avoid the city's light pollution, but I really didn't expect to see anything. I was yawning hard and I mean, I'm in *southern* Minnesota, barely north of places like Toronto and Boise (those cities being roughly the same latitude.)

Well, after a quick run through LightRoom (I doubt I'll ever see the lights as clearly with the naked eye as Diz and Craven get to) ... I captured this from my back yard, in town. Looked like haze to the naked eye.

Four second exposure, ISO 800, 50mm @ F2.0

IMG_5964.thumb.jpg.d2fa40ab72b9df5a443c42bace68bda6.jpg

 

Clouds and haze don't dance vertically, in shades of green and red.  

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Hmmmm, just a thought, if you increase your ISO to around 1600 (or even 3200), at F2, focus manually at infinity and set your shutter speed from anywhere from 8-15 secs, you might get more of the lights, as the sensor has longer to "see" them, and will terefore have more "data" to work with. This gives you more options in post-processing.  I got this info from various pamphlets/books/magazines etc over the years, the settings are buried in a notes binder I have out at the cottage.  I also have notes on Milky-Way, lightning, and general astro-photography, for the most part, they seem to work.

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Yup, I tried several of those settings, but I got overwhelmed by the local light pollution. This one was a compromise, but from a position on the middle of 50,000+ people, and with the Twin Cities metro area almost due north, I was impressed to get any results at all. 

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Not the greatest shot, didn't have my camera ready so I tried my iPhone.  Taken Saturday evening while camping at 11:28pm.  No enhancements done, it's kinda fuzzy as I tried to focus in on the trees.  Lights weren't all that spectacular, was a bit of light cloud around.  Sadly we didn't get the purples to show up this time.

 

IMG_0183.JPG

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5 minutes ago, WWSandMan said:

She'll have new knees, but the liver may be an issue... 

Seriously, next summer, just let me know when you want to come up to the lodge, lots of room :)

...and bring spare livers...

Edited by WWDarkdiz
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On 9/5/2022 at 9:57 PM, WWSandMan said:

That's just effing AWESOME!

 

~~~

 

Saturday night/Sunday morning, for some dumb reason I was still up at nearly 2am. Meghan tells me her phone was blowing up with push-notifications from her aurora apps and that I ought to go see what I can see. She tried to get me to go for a drive somewhere out of town to avoid the city's light pollution, but I really didn't expect to see anything. I was yawning hard and I mean, I'm in *southern* Minnesota, barely north of places like Toronto and Boise (those cities being roughly the same latitude.)

Well, after a quick run through LightRoom (I doubt I'll ever see the lights as clearly with the naked eye as Diz and Craven get to) ... I captured this from my back yard, in town. Looked like haze to the naked eye.

Four second exposure, ISO 800, 50mm @ F2.0

IMG_5964.thumb.jpg.d2fa40ab72b9df5a443c42bace68bda6.jpg

 

Clouds and haze don't dance vertically, in shades of green and red.  

Nice image.

Here is a sight that has some tips on using a camera for night time shots.

Do you have image stacking software? If not then here are some links to some free software that will stack images. Stacking images greatly increases the SNR for data and the images really pop after processing.

https://astrobackyard.com/the-500-rule/

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html

https://www.astronomie.be/registax/

 

Edited by SIA_Stahl
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On 9/7/2022 at 7:38 PM, WWCraven said:

Not the greatest shot, didn't have my camera ready so I tried my iPhone.  Taken Saturday evening while camping at 11:28pm.  No enhancements done, it's kinda fuzzy as I tried to focus in on the trees.  Lights weren't all that spectacular, was a bit of light cloud around.  Sadly we didn't get the purples to show up this time.

 

IMG_0183.JPG

Great phone image. You might be surprised at what is really in there. What format was the image taken? PNG or TIFF?

 

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On 9/5/2022 at 9:15 PM, WWDarkdiz said:

Last night was arguably the most spectacular Aurora I can remember.  Greens, reds, dancing across the sky like an out-of-control-tornado (hmmmm,,,,, aren't ALL tornados out of control?????)IMGP5724.thumb.JPG.65a93f3eb7a934cc8ae4d016d93b1627.JPG

This is a truly amazing image, great capture.

 

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If you guys have no issues with sharing files, you can send me an untouched. unprocessed RAW, TIFF or PNG file and I can run it through my Astrophotography software to see if I can sharpen, deconvolute, enhance nebulousness, round out stars, and clean up SNR. Prefer RAW or TIFF but can work with PNG

I currently run PixInsight for post processing and it is light years ahead of Lightroom for Astro and night time imaging.

Don't get me wrong, Light room is great but PixInsight was developed by professional astronomers who work with ESA, JPL and Nasa exclusively for astro imaging.

Edited by SIA_Stahl
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