Aurora Watch this Weekend

sryanbruen

My time lapse of the G5 on Friday night can be seen below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYGnDZValM&t

Here's a few stills. Would have gotten more variety if I had a second camera. Last one is from the phone.

Supercell

My goodness @sryanbruen those are just amazing, hard to believe they are shot in Ireland, my favourite pics you have shared here and some of your previous ones have been spectacular, thanks so much for sharing.

Calibos

Are the Aurora animations simply a series of singular long exposure photographs stitched together into an animation in software?

ie. They aren’t using a cameras video mode with particular settings or anything like that?

If singular long exposures stitched together in software, how many should we take to make a decent little animation. Like are we triggering the next 8 second exposure immediately after the previous one finishes 20-30 times in a row or 100??

I’d be using my Samsung Z Flip 5 acting as its own rotate and tilt stand and remote triggering from my Galaxy Smart watch.

Normally hardly use any of my previous smartphones storage space but I am so happy this one came with Free upgrade to 500gb as a launch promotion! Might end up actually filling it tonight or tomorrow for once battery life permitting!

cnocbui

https://youtu.be/1wGiV9ESujU

Updated timelapse from adjusted images.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122129836#Comment_122129836

A video is typically shot at say 24/30/60 fps so at 30, each frame gets 1/30th of a sec of exposure. With my camera, I settled on 8 sec exposures at ISO 400. So a video can't hack it as each frame is getting 1/240th the exposure time needed.

So, yes, these are sequential long exposure single frames stitched into a video. If you want a 10 sec video, that's 300 frames at 8 sec per shot so would take 40 minutes to shoot plus a bit for the lag between each shot.

igCorcaigh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122127934#Comment_122127934

Oh... I'm a bit disappointed now, I thought it looked like the photos in real life 🤔

batistuta9

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122130300#Comment_122130300

I'm kinda the same, it's like there's a bit of Photoshop going on. What's the point? Thought this good from Reddit, "managed to grab a photo of the northern lights over poolbeg"

Calibos

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122130300#Comment_122130300

Definitely doesn't look like most of the amazing photos you are seeing with the naked eye but it did look like some of the quick low exposure time dim photos I’ve seen some people post around the place. Naked eye, when the Aurora intensified from about 11:05-11:30pm on Friday night, it went from a patch of milky white mist over the Sea in Bray with some barely discernible striations to faint green patch and massive rays of pink, red and vermillion coming from the large green patch over the Sea converging at the zenith overhead and then spreading back out in a band of red rays that stretched all the way to the western horizon. Saying it was as bright as a rainbow might be too much but think about the times you’ve seen a fainter secondary rainbow above the main one.

So why did Cnocbui and I have a different experience? Either its because he was taking his amazing shots at the less intense times when even for me it was milky white patches to the naked eye. Even when it was milky white to the naked eye, the cameras were capturing a riot of colour. However, if he has out capturing the Aurora between 11:05-11:30pm and still only saw milky white, I’d wager his eyes never got dark adapted from looking at his cameras bright preview screen all the time.

The eye takes 15-20 minutes to get fully dark adapted. Its not about the iris widening, its the eye secreting a chemical called Rhodopsin that massively increases the light sensitivity of the eye. Any bright light will burn off the Rhodopsin in seconds though and it takes another 15-20mins to get fully dark adapted again. Think about the times you had to take a pee in the middle of the night. You walked down the landing and could easily see where you were going because your eyes dark adapted while asleep. You get to the bathroom and absent-mindedly turn on the bathroom light. You had to cover your eyes for a few seconds because of the extreme brightness. The Rhodopsin gets burned off effectively. You leave the bathroom and turn off the light. Now you bump into everything on the landing on the way back to your bedroom because its pitch black!!

Dark adaptation and not attaining it is probably why so many of the photographers are saying the Aurora was just milky white the whole time whereas another set of folks were saying we could see massive rays of colour at certain times on Friday night.

The photographers could have had the best of both worlds if they wore an eye patch on one of their eyes in order to attain and then maintain dark adaptation in that eye while leaving the other eye to look at the bright camera preview screens. Then when they wanted to look at the aurora naked eye between shots they’d just have to lift the eye patch and use their fully dark adapted eye.

firemansam4

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122130479#Comment_122130479

Great post.

A lot of people also looking at their phones inbetween does not help at all as well.

Another school of thought I have seen mentioned is that different people see the aurora differently as well, even when dark adjusted. I remember during one aurora where I seen quite vivid reds, and the person standing beside me could barely make it out.

The biggest problem is when people see photographs of the aurora and set expectations that are not real, I did myself many years ago when I went out to see my first aurora.

Just a side note for some, many of these pictures are not Photoshopped afterwards to just make them appear like there is more colour, it is just simply a case that the longer exposure to the camera sensors help bring out the colour from the shot.

Some people actually desaturate the photos in Photoshop to make them more realistic.

Basq

If you've clear skies near you, you might stand a chance of seeing something..

Calibos

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122131093#Comment_122131093

Heading down to Bray Beach now. Stars overhead!

lintdrummer

I was extremely fortunate to catch a glimpse of an exceptionally rare phenomenon in Kilkenny this evening - Brucey Borialis!

https://youtu.be/kTytMrSQXr8

Dazler97

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122129380#Comment_122129380

Are all those pics taken with an iPhone

Dazler97

It does if there really strong but to even have seen them with the naked eye was just fantastic, generally the camera picks them up better than our eyes

sryanbruen

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122131169#Comment_122131169

As I said, the last one was with phone which is indeed iPhone 13 Pro.

The others are with a Nikon D7500.

Lustrum

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122131096#Comment_122131096

Any sign? We had an amazing show on Friday in South Dublin, but nothing so far tonight although it's clear

cnocbui

So a short while ago I popped outside and took a long exposure towards the NW to see if there might anything at all and sure enough there was, but I don't know what it was.

Calibos

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122131254#Comment_122131254

Nothing I'm afraid. Its mistier tonight despite being clear over this part of the country for another hour or so. Up to about about 30 degrees its misty so the moon is a bit diffuse and you can't see the lights of Dalkey or Howth and the Dublin Skyglow is attrocious Due North. However above 30 degrees its a sharp clear starry starry night.

The KP dropped off as soon as I headed out…or whatever that NOAA page measures and displays with the green/yellow/red cescent ring animation thingie. No sooner did I head out than the red disappeared on the animation and the green pulled back north from Ireland.

Got my 10,000 steps in though, walked up to the scenic car park on Bray Head to see if I could see anything from up there away from the Seafront lights but all I saw were fogged up car windows. 🤣😂🤣

sryanbruen

The issue with going by the KP index is it's based on an average of the past 3 hours rather than what is happening. So many act like it's the be all and end all. I received a comment of somebody saying KP index was only 4 last September when I got a media breakthrough for capturing the aurora at Balbriggan (which yes I seen with the naked eye, don't need a G5 like Friday was for that). The KP index was 4 as a 3 hour average, that doesn't mean there was variation within those three hours. And anyway, a KP index of 4 or 5 is enough to get it on the northern horizon. Not particularly strong but if the solar data is in favour (a strong IMF, a southward Bz, a high density and or a fast solar wind), you will get it on camera from a relatively dark spot with an unobstructed northern horizon view and clear skies. That September event was also only a G1 which happens many times (NOAA says 1700 times per cycle) per solar cycle - solar cycles last around 11 years yet it was still fantastic and visible with the naked eye from the spot I chose and there was nobody around to distract me. No car lights or additional cameras.

I will echo what others have said. It's not "photoshop" which is usually used to say something has been manipulated as a composited image for artistic sakes or is totally fake trying to draw attention and fool gullible people. It's simply using the camera to overcome limitations of the human eye. The camera has limitations too that the human eye is better at such as dynamic range where we use editing methods to overcome. Aurora is real, it's very much real. All the colours are real. People can see things differently, we all do. None of us are the same. We all have different abilities and our eyesight varies. We're so used to living in light polluted areas. Looking at our phones, our computer screens, our TV screens, lamp posts on the road etc. We don't give ourselves time to adjust and even when we're capturing the event, we just keep looking at the camera trying to capture it instead of making time to adjust to the darkness. A great way to do both is by doing a time lapse like I did with a shutter release. Let your camera capture a time lapse for a good amount of time and leave it be with the shutter release button on hold so it doesn't stop until you pull it back down. That gives you time to enjoy the event and adjust whilst also capturing it.

A lot of the apps giving alerts are also reflective of what is happening rather than what is expected to happen. Generally you need to plan a location to go to in advance - Friday was extreme and should not be considered a benchmark, think of it like the July 1985 of auroras - and the best way to be able to tell is by looking at the data on spaceweatherlive. The Bz is the most important value as Earth's magnetosphere is northward. This means all particles are attracted towards the north and south poles and a southward oriented Bz allows those particles to be transferred to lower latitudes of the interplanetary magnetic field. Unlike magnetic poles (which are opposites of the geographic poles) attract each other and like poles repel each other. A flimsy Bz or northward Bz is usually a bad sign and brings the energy away from us. This is what happened the past few nights and we also expected another CME to arrive which did not happen until late last night. You will need other factors to be significantly high to overcome this for a reasonable chance of seeing the aurora. Mind, it's not instantaneous. A northward Bz after a prolonged period of southward oriented Bz doesn't just mean it's all gone. It takes time to build in the IMF and this will depend on the state of the solar wind. The solar wind will also tell you how long you will be waiting between bursts as aurora tends to come in bursts. If you've got a slow solar wind (less than 400 km/s) then you'll be waiting a while - at least an hour between bursts. If you've got a fast solar wind (more than 600 km/s) then you'll be waiting much shorter and if it's extremely fast, you may only be waiting less than 20 minutes between bursts. The aurora graphics like NOAA does also show only the auroral oval being overhead, it doesn't mean you won't see the aurora here - just that you will need to go to a spot with an unobstructed northern horizon.

Another important part is looking at webcams and reports from places already in darkness. Twitter is a great place for this (even in the Musk era) and there's a good amount of webcams out there in places like the Shetland Isles for aurora observation. Adam Rory Porter Photography has a webcam too that's on from time to time on his YouTube channel (link always changes) from Donegal that's amazing for aurora watching.

As for capturing it, well I did a tutorial elsewhere on how I recommend capturing that I will put here which people will hopefully find useful for future reference.

To capture it on phone, it depends on which phone you are using. Here are a few I have noted:

1. iPhone. This applies to iPhone 11 onwards which all have access to night mode. You simply use night mode. Handheld you can shoot up to an exposure time of 10 seconds. If it's stabilised on a tripod, you can shoot up to an exposure time of 30 seconds. If it's not, the 30 seconds will not be an option. The longer the better with iPhone for cleaner images with minimal digital noise or grain. This doesn't mean it's capturing 10 seconds or 30 seconds worth of exposure though, it's capturing multiple exposures and stacking them together into a single image for you. You don't have to but ProRaw on iPhone 12 Pro onwards also is great to use to give the photos more of a pop without compromising on quality in post production if you intend to do so - if you don't, leave it off as it fills up your storage much quicker than JPEG or .HEIC files. If you have an older iPhone than 11 without night mode, you will need a third party app like Even Longer to be able to capture the aurora as older iPhones have smaller sensors, no night mode computation and don't capture enough light.
2. Google Pixel. There's a few ways to capture with a Pixel. From the Pixel 3 onwards, you have access to astrophotography mode where it captures multiple images over 4 minutes and stacks them together to give a clean, noise-free image. It also detects the stars so you don't get blurry stars or star trails. For astrophotography mode to work, you need to activate it in the settings so it kicks in then choose night sight mode. Have the phone stabilised on a tripod and if you see the night sight symbol change from moon to stars, you will know astrophotography mode has kicked in. At the end of it, you will also get a quick 1 second time lapse of the images it captured over those 4 minutes. You can simply use night sight mode itself as this is night mode much like on the iPhone. On the Pixel 8 Pro, you also have access to manual settings of shutter speed and ISO. You should lean towards an ISO of 800-1600 and a shutter speed of 5-15 seconds depending on how dark the environment is and how much you're willing to compromise on sharpness of the fast moving aurora.
3. Samsung and most other Android phones. Again night mode is an option. But generally with this one, I recommend using the Pro mode which is the manual mode on these phones. Once again veer towards an ISO of 800-1600 and a shutter speed of 5-15 seconds depending on how dark the environment is and how much you're willing to compromise on sharpness of the fast moving aurora for a cleaner image.
4. DSLR or mirrorless cameras. First and foremost, you should use a wide angle lens if possible. Wide angles being with a focal length under 24mm, 14-16mm is a good ballpark for sharpness and reach. You don't want to go too wide as you'll get fisheye and or a lot of distortion unless you're willing to compromise on that and get as much of the sky in frame as possible. You will ideally have a fast aperture lens (low f-stop number) of at least f2.8 to allow in enough light or you'll need to compensate with a higher ISO (which will introduce more and more grain to your image) or a slower shutter speed (which will blur out the details in the aurora). So generally speaking, you should go with the max aperture (smallest f-stop number) possible on your lens which can vary from lens to lens. You can get reasonably priced fast wide angle prime lenses. Zoom ones are much more expensive. You pay for quality if you're thinking how absurd the prices of some are, it's not easy to manufacture the glass needed for fast aperture lenses. When you may not use the max aperture is when you're shooting relatively close with a narrow plane of focus then you should stop down the aperture a bit so the field of view is somewhat sharper like f2.8 to f4.0. Ideally your shutter speed will be under 10 seconds for keeping the aurora sharp but this varies on the environment you're in and the type of aurora event you're having. If your camera is poor with noise reduction and high ISOs such as older models or APS-c bodies, you may also up the shutter speed to longer to keep your images usable. The last thing to adjust is the ISO which you'll change accordingly to how much additional light your sensor will require to get a good exposed image. As with the phones, I veer towards ISO 800-1600 personally generally but you can adjust this higher comfortably with most modern full frame cameras and still get good quality, noise-free images especially with all the AI noise reduction software out there now such as Topaz and Adobe Lightroom.

Markus Antonius

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMOu0L0NyE

My own selection of timelapses from Friday night in Galway. (Shot using Nikon D750, ISO 320, 15-20s exposures, assembled in Adobe Premiere Pro)

SharkMX

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122130300#Comment_122130300

If it happens again tonight make sure you are in a dark area and dont look at your phone or use a torch.

Friday night I found that if i was in an area with no lights
whatsoever in my field of view that after abut 30 minutes the colours
and wavy patterns were the same to my eyes as i see in the photographs.
If i looked at my phone screen to take photographs then it took another
half hour or so for my vision to get back to seeing the colourful
display, so i stopped taking photographs until i was ready to go home. I
was out for hours lying down on a picnic blanket looking up.

Then on Saturday I was with family in the same location that was empty on
Friday and there were 4 or 5 cars there with headlights left on and
ruining it for everyone. People all looking at their phones.

We
didnt see anything on Saturday at all but surely the experience, if
there was anything to be seen, would have been diminished with
headlights and phones and torches everywhere, so not even sure if there
was anything to see or if they were drowned out because our eyes never
got to adjust. It was too late anyway at that point to go to a darker
more isolated location as the cloud was coming in then.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122132161#Comment_122132161

Fantastic effort there.

On the photoshoping cat calls.

Every astro or space photo you have ever seen in your life has been extensively 'shopped' to a degree you can scarcely imagine. Remember those amazing photos of the flyby of Pluto a few years back? Well every one of those stunning images is BS, if you think photo adjustment or manipulation is somehow wrong or cheating. If you were along for the ride in person, what do you think you would have seen with your own eyes? Grab a lump of coal, go out into a really dark place at night where it's so pitch black you can't even see any sky glow from even a small town, like out on the Nullarbor plain in Australia (which is an amazing experience) and set up a 40w light bulb on a stand and a generator to power it, now walk 5km away or maybe further to a point where you can just barely see the bulb, now hold out the lump of coal at arms length and tell us what you see or take a photo of it. The light level from the sun at Pluto is one thousandth that on Earth, so that lump of coal is about what you would see with your eyes - or more likely not see.

To get those amazing photos of galaxies or nebulae you likely have seen, photographers/astronomers have to do so much to get even one shot you would scarcely believe it, many tens of dark frames with the camera at the shooting temperature and the lens cap on, the same indoors of a uniform white surface with cap off; and likely hundreds of actual photos of the object itself, possibly even using a motorised tripod mount that moves the camera slowly in just the right way to counteract the rotation of the earth for long exposures and focal lengths so stars look like single points instead of streaks, then special software is used to average and stack all the images, using the dark frames to adjust every single pixel to counteract it's intrinsic 'noise' and then the results from all that are 'shopped' again to produce something you can see and appreciate.

All the images you have 'seen' taken with the James Webb space telescope should have just been black rectangles, if you want 'what my eyes see' truth, because it takes images in the infra red spectrum which you can't see. Those images are all manipulated to the moon and back.

The Aurora was dim to my eyes. It was dim enough to my camera/lens combo that I had to set the camera to internally multiply the signal from every sensor pixel by 2 (ISO 400) and keep the shutter open for 8 seconds to let a reasonable amount of light in to register enough of an image to work with. Some were 15 seconds and a few even longer, resulting in streaked stars.

The trouble is the Aurora is not static, it shifts and changes mercurially, so in order to catch as much detail as possible, I used shortish shutter speeds of 8 seconds and then shopped. Longer exposure times yielded brighter images that needed less or no adjustment, but then the details were lost and the aurora was more smeared because it was moving and changing during the exposure. So either lose detail and shop less or, catch details and shop more.

Here is a photo I took at the beginning of the 'show' to try and find the settings that would yield useful results. It was only a 4 sec exposure. The top third is the photo straight out of the camera, no adjustments, the middle third is the photo with only the brightness increased. The bottom third is with more adjustments to better emphasise the colours that are there in the image. Nothing in the image was addded to it, it's just manipulation of the brightness in general and of individual RGB colour channels to better reveal what is actually there in the image. Which is the better truth? I think beauty and truth are in the eye of the beholder (click to enlarge).

Phones do a lot of manipulation automatically so you don't end up with images that look like that top third. Your brain does shopping. Ever seen photos taken indoors, that are lit with incandescent bulbs, that have a strong orange cast to them or maybe a sickly greenish cast if the lights are flourescent? Well the photos reveal the truth of the color temperature of the light source, which your brain manipulates for a more optimal human experience when you are in such places viewing them directly.

cnocbui

Here's another I missed. 15 sec exposure, so that long exposure is a form of manipulation, right there. Actually it was a 30 sec exposure, because after the exposure the camera closed the shutter, took another 15 sec frame of blackness to provide a baseline of the intrinsic noise from each pixel of the sensor under the same exposure conditions, and used that info to subtract the sensor noise from the original exposure, so more manipulation.

Straight from camera for the purists and manipulated versions :

sryanbruen

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122133089#Comment_122133089

I turn off noise reduction in the camera because it wastes pure time that could be used capturing other images of the moment and I'd much rather do it myself in post production.

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122133089#Comment_122133089

Photography can often lead into a philosophical debate about what is seen and not seen. I personally prefer not to get into this debate at all as in the end, you could consider all photographs to be "fake".

I take the approach that if the photograph looks good, people should see it regardless of how close to reality it is, as ultimately, what is reality given we all have different levels of vision? All we can do in my opinion is publish the image along with the settings and let the viewer take from it what they want.

I don't claim to have seen with my eye, what is in the video above, but the representation I captured looks good as hell. Maybe it's a better representation of what a fox or an owl sees? But does this mean a human should not see it? I would rather see it.

Dazler97

More good chances to see them tonight although not as good as last week but none the less keep your eyes peeled