Aurora Borealis
- The Northern Lights
Once in every few years
the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights will be visible from the
lower latitudes in England. It is not a common phenomenon, but
on occasion it does happen. When the Sun is most active in its
solar cycle then some of the more violent eruptions from the Sun's
surface called Coronal Mass Ejections - CME's can send masses
of charged particles towards the Earth. This interacts with the
Earth's magnetic field and cause the Aurora to appear at the polar
regions. When there is a huge mass of particles headed our way,
then even in the UK we can get a surprising view of this incredible
event.
This was the case on
the night of April 6th / April the 7th 2000. Many of us astro
anoraks were out to watch the conjunction of the planets and the
Moon earlier on that evening, quite a spectacle in itself, and
some of us decided that as it wasn't a bad night, so we might
do a little observing. Keen to try and work out how to use my
new CCD camera I started to struggle to image M51. I don't know
why but I really do seem to make hard work of it sometimes, but
such is life. At about 0030 hrs in the morning I had just managed
to get M51 in focus, and proceeded to try and get an image of
some description, just as I started the exposure, I noticed a
small red glow in the east - North East, my immediate thought
was cloud being illuminated by a rogue street light, when suddenly
I thought that's not a cloud. As soon as I said that the whole
sky lit up as if someone had just turned up the dimmer switch.
The whole sky shone with greens and reds with curtains of sky
dancing in front of my very eyes. The colours shot right over
head, and you could have knocked me down with a feather. It was
awesome. I rushed inside to tell my wife, and grabbed a camera.
Below are the images from the few shots that I took. It really
did look like that.
....
....
For the technical Olympus
OM1 with 16mm, 8mm, and 50mm lenses. Film Fuji 800, printed by
Boot's the Chemist and scanned using a Epson GT4500 flat bed scanner.
Exposures 20 - 40 secs at f2.8
Astronomy
Home . . Aurora
September 2002 .
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