A Photo is Worth a Thousand Blessings?

It's been a whirlwind month so far, and all because of one picture that I took, which is shown below. It was taken with a Canon 40D and my new Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens.



I had also taken photos of the Perseid Meteor Shower a week after the Aurora, but more on that later. I had submitted my photos to Spaceweather.com and three of them got posted at the bottom of the following pages -

August 2010 Aurora Gallery page 3


August 2010 Aurora Gallery page 4


As a result of the Spaceweather.com postings, a reporter from SPACE.com got a hold of me and asked my permission to use one of the photos in a news story she was working on. Naturally, I said, "Yes." The story got posted on the SPACE.com and Yahoo.com websites.

SPACE.com Aurora story



Yahoo.com Aurora story


Then I got contacted by a guy who works for the Group for Earth Observation GEO and asked permission to use one of the photos in their magazine. Again, I said, "Yes." Once it is ready, I'll post some photos of it.

After that, I submitted one of the photos to the Astronomy Photo of the Day webstite APOD. While it didn't make the cut to get posted their, a woman asked permission to post the photo of the websites forum called Starship Asterisk - APOD and General Astronomy Discussion Forum


Then, the CTV News morning show Canada AM and I were in talks to do an on-camera interbiew to be broadcast during the show. Unfortunately, due to a major breaking news story, it had to be postponed. I had to submit a number of photos to them on the Aurora and the Perseid Meteor Shower, as well as a headshot in case they wanted to do a phone interview instead. Well, I'm still waiting to hear about that.

However, as a consolation prize, my Aurora photo appeared on a blog by a reporter at the local newspaper, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. Her blog is called Mousing Around and the post she did on my photo can be found here.


As a result of her efforts, my Aurora photo was also printed in the Star Phoenix newspaper. Below is the picture of my Aurora photo in the newspaper along with a story about my good friend Bob of Blackholes and astrostuff.


One of my meteor shower pictures was chosen as one of the Yahoo Editorial Perseid Meteor Gallery.



And finally, to top it all off, one of my Aurora photos was chosen as the SkyNews Editor's Choice Photo of the Week.



I feel very blessed to have received all of this attention. It means a lot to me and has been a very special experience.

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!