More adventures in astronomy – Aurora Borealis

 

Taken with my mobile phone attached to a tripod – this is a series of images overlayed taken at 1:20 am on 11th May 2024 Brechiek Ynysek Syllan

 

 

Multiple image panorama taken 11th May 2024 Brechiek Ynysek Syllan Ursa Major high on the left and Cassiopeia lower

 

What a fab night, started to watch the aurora just after 11 pm 10th May and finally called it a night at around 3 am. The aurora was caused by multipe cme’s impacting on the Earth’s magnetic field from a Carrington level sunspot group. Paintings to follow.

 

A word on the images. The human eye see’s fundamentally in a different way to a camera. A camera can pick up the colour’s of the aurora whereas our eye’s working differently in comparison to night and day tend to pick up on tone and light, far more useful at night when colours are hard to see anyway. It is possible to see the colour’s of the aurora with the eye during intense auroral displays however the eye see’s using rods and cones ….. cones are responsible for our sense of colour and rods are more useful at night for light and tone. It is just the way it is. So to this end I wanted to give a comparison of what the camera saw, an enhanced image and how my unaided eye saw the aurora. My reason for this is that some people can be disapointed at seeing the aurora for the first time and not seeing the colour’s that camera’s pick up, also people who take the images tend to enhance the image to pick out not only the cours but also the details in the structure of the aurora.

My preference is always to see with my eye and I am never disapointed with how the aurora appear. Here are three images, the first is the camera image as it saw the aurora on the 10th May 2024. The second is the same image enhanced, and the third image is also modified to show the aurora as my eye’s saw the aurora as near as I can manipulate the image ….

 

As the camera saw and not manipulated

 

 

Same image manipulated and enhanced to bring out the colour and details

 

 

Same image manipulated as best I can to show how my eye’s saw the aurora