Auroras and Meteors

I was fortunate enough to be able to capture the spectacular Aurora on August 3, 2010 and the Perseid Meteor shower on August 12, 2010. I was out with Bob of Blackholes and astrostuff for each event. We both snapped hundreds of photos and managed to pull off a few shots. The Aurora was an amazing event. The colors were something else, with lots of green and purple (which I have never seen in Aurora before).

The meteor shower was a bit lackluster. It was definitely not the same as previous years, where 100 meteors per hour was common. Not this year. We were lucky if we saw 20 the whole night. I had two cameras snapping photos and ended up taking about 450 pictures in total, but only caught about 15 meteors. It had also been raining all day so it was humid, which made it hard to keep the camera lens from fogging up. It also got cloudy, as you'll see in the pictures.

The pictures below are of the Aurora first, then meteors. Enjoy!

Northern Lights In the North (Sort Of)

I had the chance to finally capture some Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) on April 5, 2010. I was out with my good friend Bob of Blackholes and Astrostuff and went just outside the city limits to catch them. They didn't last too long, so we had to work fast. For my first time photographing them, I was pleasantly surprised with the results. At first, I was skeptical about how the shots would turn out, because I was using my Nikon D90, which is notoriously bad for the level of noise it introduces into night shots. But, with a little tweaking using my software, I was able to get the shots looking half-decent.

Aurora's are basically the emission of photons in Earth's upper atmosphere. For a more detailed description, please click here. I can try to explain it but I'm not a science-type guy and therefore wouldn't do it justice. Also, in the title, I have sort of in brackets. The reason for that is because while we may be fairly north of some places that can see the Northern Lights, we are not far enough to see the amazing ones that are seen in the Arctic. They still look pretty awesome.

And a special thanks to Planetaryman (my Dad) for being my newest follower.

Enjoy the photos. And hopefully, Blogger won't butcher them too much this time.