Northern Lights and Proton Arc

The aurora forecast looked promising last night, so I decided to try and stay up and see if I could see anything.  I am surprised with how great the photos turned out, as frankly it wasn’t as vibrant to my eye as it was to the camera.  But, it wasn’t really dark yet either, at least at the start.

I didn’t know what it was until I saw it mentioned on some other people’s photos, but I captured a proton arc last night as well!

Most of the streaks through the photos are satellites, but there was one brilliant meteor that passed through as well.  Unfortunately, it rained yesterday afternoon and the evening was quite damp, and I ended up with some condensation on my lens on the later photos, which put halos around the brightest of the stars.

All in all though, I am really, really pleased I stayed up!  I hope you enjoy, have a great evening!

A beautiful display by mother nature! All photos 30sec, f3.5, ISO 2500. Taken with a Nikon D610 with the DX 10-24mm wide angle lens, using the cameras built in interval timer.
A beautiful display by mother nature! All photos 30sec, f3.5, ISO 2500. Taken with a Nikon D610 with the DX 10-24mm wide angle lens, using the cameras built in interval timer.

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The proton arc stretched out above. I had no idea what I was looking at!

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When the interval I has set was over, I swung the camera about 90 degrees to capture the proton arc crossing in front of the milky way.
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There are lots of satellite trails, but this one was definitely a meteor.

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The green along the tree line really shimmered and danced. It’s a shame the condensation caused those halos around the stars.

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Here’s a quick time lapse I did of the sequence of photos I took.  I think it does a nice job to show the beautiful movement in the sky.

0 Replies to “Northern Lights and Proton Arc”

  1. Gorgeous! Love the array of color at the beginning with the little bit of light and the ending pics are spectacular too! I’m glad you stayed up too;)

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