The Aurora Borealis

Back in May, when my wife and I were in Chicago, the amateur astronomer in me was bummed that I was missing what seemed like a once-in-a-generation display of the aurora borealis. Having booked a lot of moving parts for that trip months in advance, there was really no way I could have changed anything to see it. While my friends were texting me about it, I found myself in light pollution central.

In all honesty, I confess that I’ve been cooling off on pursuing astronomy as a hobby over these past few years. But I still get exhilarated by seeing something new. Last night’s appearance of the aurora borealis in my little corner of the Pacific Northwest was my opportunity to feel that sense of exhilaration again.

It was actually a text message from a neighbor yesterday morning that prompted me to have a look. Without that message, I may very well have blown my opportunity by window shopping for camera lenses online.

Getting the full experience required patience. At around 10 pm, I stepped outside and looked north to see what was visible to the naked eye. I didn’t see much at all. But I knew that my eyes weren’t at all dark-adjusted, so I went back inside, got my Canon EOS R8 and my 24-105mm f/4-7.1 zoom lens, put my rig on a tripod, set my aperture wide open and my focal length to its widest setting, and took a few quick 30-second exposures.

From that initial round, this was the best image I managed to capture:

A little nonplussed even by what my camera could see, I figured I was too far south to take in the aurora in all of its glory. I heard the call of my Questar and got it set up in the backyard to have a look at Saturn, which was by that point high in the sky.

After I brought my telescope back inside but before I headed off to bed, I thought to myself that it might be worth having another go at photographing the aurora borealis.

At first, it seemed I was just capturing more of what I had photographed earlier. Composed of three 30-second exposures, this animated GIF illustrates what I saw:

But then activity began to pick up. Here is a six-frame animated GIF of what I observed next:

I relocated myself to a much less obscured spot, which is what I should have done to begin with. I continued to see an increase in activity:

Everything culminated with this shot:

I was a little unhappy with the small patches of clouds that passed between me and the aurora. When I am trying to observe a rare occurance of some kind or another, a cloud often manages to sneak right in front of what I’m looking at while the rest of the sky is totally clear. I have to remind myself that dealing with clouds is a reality of doing astronomy.

For a while longer, I just stood there and continued to take several 30-second exposures. This was the display the aurora continued to put on:

Not long after that, things began to settle down a bit:

Over the course of time that I was out with my camera, as a graph on NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center now tells me, I seem to have hit the peak of auroral activity.

During that second observing session, I was out from between 11:30 PM and 1:00 AM local time, or 6:30 to 8:00 AM universal time. According to NOAA’s data, the peak of activity occurred between 6:00 PM and 9:00 AM universal time. I managed to hit that peak activity just before it faded.

I should emphasize that, to my naked eye, the auroras that I saw were usually little else but grey patches that undulated in extreme slow motion. They appeared one moment and then disappeared the next. But during more intense periods of activity, my eye could definitely pick up red-hued haziness across the northern horizon and extending up maybe 20 or 30 degrees in altitude. The bright areas that turned up green in my photographs looked like brighter grey regions to my eye. The whole thing looked like patchy light pollution on the horizon from a city or town in the far-off distance. But of course, what I was seeing was certainly not human-made light pollution.

More than anything else, I was thankful to have witnessed something I have always wanted to experience for myself.