Astro716: October 2024: An Amazing Month for Astronomy

Sunday, November 3, 2024

October 2024: An Amazing Month for Astronomy - Part 1

Aurora! Aurora!

Technically this awesome month of astronomy began on Monday 10/7 when we images the NGC 7331 Group (Deerlick Group). Click here to read about that. Potential for aurora, or the Northern Lights were forecast for October 10th into the morning of October 11th. I missed the amazing auroral display of May 2024 due to the weather at my location. The Board of Directors for our local astronomy club, the Buffalo Astronomical Association, had a meeting scheduled for the 10th. After work, I set up my DSLR on a tripod and got my Smartphone tripod out and ready. Forecast was for clear skies, I did not want to miss this one! We started the Zoom meeting, as twilight approached, our observatory director and I would go outside in our respective locations and look for evidence of activity. Another member of our imaging sub-group texted the Observatory director, indicating activity in twilight in the East. I never returned to the meeting. Sorry, not sorry. At some point I received a text from our club's president saying the meeting was over due to the activity.

I did have a work meeting scheduled for 8:30 pm. I tried to get as many images as possible prior to the meeting. I'm glad I did as the activity had ramped down after 9 pm. I called it a night around 10 pm. I understand things ramped back up later, but as it was a work night, I decided to call it a night early.
The display seemed to be all around with the most intense area to the East/Southeast. A red band stretched from southeast to west, just over the Moon. Initially, our Observatory Director thought this might be Steve, but afterwards he found a great reference article that identified this as a SAR (Stable Auroral Red) arc. I tried to capture images from most angles. The neighbor's lights did not help.

Here is a collection of iPhone and DSLR photos. I still have more photos to process. Between life, work, and chasing the comet (more on that in Part 2), I have had minimal time to process images.

Equipment/Processing:

iPhone 13Pro and tripod
Canon T6i (Ha mod), Rokinon 14 mm f/2.8 lens, Tripod, and intervalometer (used mainly as a shutter release.
iPhone images were not processed (other than whatever the native app does automatically)
DLSR images were processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic