Aurora March 21st from the BMO

 An unexpected surprise ...

Friday night March 21^st 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.

Aurora captured from the BMO on 3/21/2025. iPhone on a tripod.

Image Details:

Capture Date: 3/21/2025

Location: North Java, NY (Beaver Meadow Observatory)

Telescope: N/A

Camera: iPhone 13 pro

Filter: N/A

Mount: Tripod

Exposure: 7.5 sec @ ISO 1250 26 mm f/1.5

Software: N/A

Clear Skies!

Ernie

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

iPhone Images:

Looking Northeast

Looking Northeast

Looking West/Northwest

Looking North

Looking Northeast

Looking Northeast/East

Looking East

Looking East

Looking East

looking East/Southeast

DSLR Images:

Looking East/Southeast - - 4 sec / ISO 800 / f/2.8

Looking East/Southeast - 4 sec / ISO 800 / f/2.8

Looking South/Southwest - 2.5 sec / ISO 800 / f/2.8. This image shows the SAR (Stable Auroral Red) Arc. The red in the trees is from my headlamp.

Clear Skies!

Ernie