An unexpected surprise ...
Friday night March 21st was intended to be one of
our club’s Messier Marathon nights. Due to the forecast for clouds after 11 pm
and poor sky conditions, the organizers decided to postpone. Although I
disagreed with this call, as a person responsible for multiple astronomy
related events per year, I respect the difficulty in making this call. Our club’s
observatory director and I decided to head out to the observatory anyway. Our
plan was to work on correcting sensor tilt with a new camera that is intended
to be used with our Tele Vue NP101is. Imagine the telescope presents an image
to the sensor in the form of a circle. If the plane of this circle is not aligned
with the plane of the sensor, stars will be elongated in parts of the resulting
image. Since the skies weren’t great, it was good use of the time to perform
this tedious work. One of the participants of the Messier Marathon decided to
come out anyway and visually observed for a few hours.
After successfully improving the sensor tile of the telescope/camera system, I checked my phone and saw reports of Aurora in our area. It was a little before 11 pm. We went outside and faint Aurora were indeed detectable (by camera only). The display would ebb and flow, ultimately, we decided to pack it in and head home for the evening (it was a very long and tiring week). This is a single photo from my iPhone. The iPhone was mounted on a fixed tripod. My red headlamp illuminated the Sky Shed Pod and the Main Observatory structure. No additional processing, other than what processing the phone automatically performs, was done to the image.
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| Aurora captured from the BMO on 3/21/2025. iPhone on a tripod. |
