Wednesday, October 9, 2024

A lot going on

After yesterday's accidental Northern Lights, I decided to go for it intentionally last night. The first picture is 660 30-second images from the 5D/14mm lens. I spotted a few faint trails that might be meteors, but I think most of the stuff in the lower left corner is satellite flashes. The shooting time was 5 hours, 40 minutes, and the battery (the good one) gave out at 2:17 am. (Unlike with the ancient 1D, Canon did not give me an AC power adapter with the 5D or 6D. The official Canon AC adapter is $140 but I found a knockoff with good reviews on Amazon for $21 that should work with both cameras.) The 660 images overwhelm the Northern Lights, so I narrowed it down to the 97 images between 11:04 and 11:54 pm that showed the most glow. StarStaX did a good job giving me preliminary views and I could have used those composites here, but for these "official" images I did them in Photoshop.

Below that are a couple of Northern Lights single frames. Not as vivid as the previous night, but technically better. With the exposure shortened from 90 seconds to 30, the structure is more defined and there is no obvious star trailing.

The next few nights I am considering doing some 30-second exposures, but not continuously. Maybe with a minute in between. It seems when the Northern Lights start up, they last for a little while, and I don't need to do any more huge star trail stacks again soon. That would still get me 240 images in the six hours starting at 8 pm.

Stack of 660 images
Stack of 97 images with Northern Lights
11:11 pm
11:12 pm

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