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11 Jun 2021 06:16

No filters or eclipse glasses necessary.  Just lucky to see anything through the clouds.
Reminds me of the May 1994 eclipse here in NY, the sun was in and out of the clouds, but at peak eclipse (sun about 90% covered!) I could see the sun through the clouds and I even used a pair of 10x50 binoculars to see the spectacle (no protection at all.)  I know it probably wasn't safe but it was only for a few seconds and I wanted to see it directly.
 
vlad01
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03 Sep 2021 07:13

Been a while since my friend and I took any pics as the weather was bad for many months but we got these 2.

Lagoon and Cat's paw nebula.
Lagoon.png
cats_paw.PNG
 
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03 Sep 2021 11:20

Wow beautiful!  I wonder how dim the dimmest stars you've captured are!  Orion season has begun!  My favorite time of the year!
 
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Watsisname
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04 Nov 2021 12:36

An extremely lucky catch of the aurora this morning. It has been overcast, rainy and windy for days on end here, save for a 45-minute clear slot in the storm that managed to go over at just the right time.

The colors and movement were among the best I've ever seen. Greens down low, reds up high, and blues and purples blending in as sunlight began scattering off their tops.

Image
Image
Image
 
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midtskogen
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04 Nov 2021 13:57

Nice colours.  How faint were these auroras as seen with your own eyes?

I also noticed the aurora yesterday.  I first noticed it because I was working calibrating the meteor cameras that we've installed at Gaustatoppen (1846 masl) in southern Norway, so I saw it on screen before I looked out of the window :D.  Still very experimental as this summit has some of the most extreme weather in Norway.  Since clear weather had been forecast, we had just removed the 5 cm thick layer of ice that had formed on the camera dome over the past week (we're still working on better heating solutions) and the clear sky was an opportunity to calibrate the cameras.  The aurora was a bonus (and it didn't last all night, so the calibration wasn't spoiled by it).  The cameras record at 25 fps, and I think the sensitivity is quite decent.

EDIT: inlining Youtube didn't work for some reason, so here's the video link.

[youtube]aGgOiqb5Rpk[/youtube]

Still from the video:
x.jpg
NIL DIFFICILE VOLENTI
 
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05 Nov 2021 02:42

Last night was a great night for astronomy, nice aurorae AND a meteor shower to boot!
 
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Watsisname
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05 Nov 2021 07:50

Nice colours.  How faint were these auroras as seen with your own eyes?
Bright enough to be obvious to the naked eye, maybe comparable to mid nautical twilight (like the Sun being 9 degrees below horizon). It clouded up again before civil twilight, but I think they would have been lost to the sky brightness by then anyway.  

The biggest difference of course is color. Cameras pick up the colors in low light very well, while to the eye they are more subtle. Something like this:

Image
Last night was a great night for astronomy, nice aurorae AND a meteor shower to boot!
Totally! I saw several meteors during the show, some were quite spectacular. :)
 
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midtskogen
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05 Nov 2021 08:31

 I saw several meteors during the show, some were quite spectacular.
Probably Taurids.

Colour is hard to see in the dark, but the green aurora is totally green.
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Watsisname
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05 Nov 2021 08:54

Interestingly it was the blues that stood out to me the most. Maybe because the greens were very low, appearing more yellow and blending in with light pollution. And blue is still pretty close to the center of our eye's sensitivity curve, so we can see it better than red and violet.
 
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midtskogen
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05 Nov 2021 10:23

80-90% of the time I've only seen green aurora.  Quite rarely there is some red above.  I've never seen other colours, but perhaps I haven't look closely enough.  Maybe too much streetlight and light pollution amplified by snow, or the green is too dominating to notice the other colours.

At low latitudes the green aurora will often be below the horizon, so only the colours created high in the atmosphere are visible.
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06 Nov 2021 13:26

Interestingly it was the blues that stood out to me the most. Maybe because the greens were very low, appearing more yellow and blending in with light pollution. And blue is still pretty close to the center of our eye's sensitivity curve, so we can see it better than red and violet.
Yes, I was thinking that too (although greens are close to blue in terms of our eyes' ability to detect them.)

Wat, I see some like to shoot videos of the back of their camera's LCD for northern lights' displays....is that because it is easier to detect the colors in those?
 
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Watsisname
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06 Nov 2021 19:39

Turns out the astronauts on the ISS saw the show, too, and got incredible photos. :D Their orbit passed over the northern US and Canada a few times during the peak of the storm that morning. Probably just a couple hours before I was out. :) (Couldn't be exactly the same time since that pass would have been in orbital sunrise then.)

Image
 
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10 Nov 2021 00:03

as amazing as northern lights are down here, they are truly magical up there.  It almost looks like the earth giftwrapped as a present for all of us to share!
 
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midtskogen
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28 Nov 2021 16:00

There was some aurora over northern Norway last night, nothing very spectacular, but when I stacked 20 minutes of video I got this which looks more impressive:
max2.jpg
Usually, stacks like this quickly saturate the sky or the aurora gets to smeared, but here the aurora bands appeared and disappeared in different places all the time.
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A-L-E-X
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28 Nov 2021 20:33

wow this is very nice, Mid, what did it look like as far as what you could actually see with your eyes?

also what do you use to stack videos? I assume you extract the individual frames?

the little streaks that are visible embedded in the display, are those meteors?

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