The Aurora of July

It’s not exactly the weather I’m used to typing about, but Space Weather has gained a ton of momentum after Sun observing satellites have been launched in orbit in recent years.

Another way to gain momentum on a less talked about subject is to experience it for yourself, and learn upon it.

The weekend of July 13th I briefly heard about a sun flare up. I didn’t immediately act on it, it was mid morning, silly. Later I did hear that an Aurora may be visible Saturday and Sunday nights, and could be further south than the usual viewers. A ‘Class X1.4’ as specified. Here is a brief video found about the flare, along with a couple colorful charts that show a disruption in typical oscillation, by which you can tell is the flare occurring.

I’ve heard the whole, “may be visible in places as far south as ‘x’ and ‘y’!” So I was sceptical. Last time I was up at Mount Pleasant and caught faint red in the sky, but it was barely noticeable. Getting that shot didn’t make up for the early morning the next day, or the chilly temps:

Some Northern Lights over Mount Pleasant back in October 11′.

The night started frustrating. First, its summer, and the sun takes forever to set and have the horizon light diminish. Second, there was the most irritating layer of high clouds messing around. They took their time moving out, but looked like false aurora at the time.

Throughout the night, I took a few test photos to size up a subtle foreground, and to see if the lights showed up. Curiosity kept me up past 1am and then 2am, and eventually spotted some on the horizon looking due north!

Very cool to see this pop up on the camera screen after the exposure. Your eye could not see it like this. At most, it was a faint blob , almost like a cloud. After I was satisfied with camera settings, I opted to get the camera going for a time-lapse. This would be a great opportunity to see the faint aurora in motion since it was so easy to miss by the naked eye. Settings were f/3.5, 60 second exposures, ISO 800, for 2 hours.

If stars are exposed, you can do some star trails! Perhaps a little too busy though, and the aurora looks like a blob of color. Cool none the less.

This also was not the shot that came straight from the camera, we’ll head to the camera corner to discuss this a bit more.

One of the powerful factors of a digital photo is ‘white balance’. Essentially, what the camera ‘thinks’ is white. If it knows what tone value white is, it can adjust the other colors in the image based on that. Digital cameras typically have an Auto mode for this, as well as multiple presets for situations. These vary from Sunny, Shade, as well as some indoor lighting like Florescent and Tungsten lighting. Auto does a really good job, sometimes going to a preset will offer a little tinge that you find appealing. Selecting a preset is also great to ‘lock in’ a look to the photo. This is really important to remember when taking time lapses because you do not want colors changing every frame, like it may with Auto.

Post processing a photo can be quick, or it can be a painstakingly, nitpicky process. Lightroom gives you so many things to flip around and edit, you can get lost! Most of the time, you just want to process the photo how you saw it. The camera doesn’t get it right all the time, and you need to change a tone, crop this out, increase/decrease exposure, and realign the horizon. Well, here is a before and after of the still shot.

Where did that color come from!??!

You can see what I mean by just a faint blob on the horizon. Still, your eye could barely pick it up. All of the orange tone was using the preset of Sunny. This was consistent with the timelapse shots as well.

Had I been in Mount Pleasant, about 2 hours north, I imagine the show would have been closer. However, with this set up I’m thankful for what turned out. Down the road, we’ll have to go aurora chasing!