Aurora over Creede!

 Last night (07 Oct) I was outside at 10:30 pm photographing the night sky with a Sony A7iii camera and a Sony FE 20mm f/1.8 lens.  The sky was not particularly dark (sqml=21.05) and the camera was picking up strong red color in the northern sky.  The color was not visible to the unaided eye, but was quite spectacular in the 30 s camera exposures.

After processing this first set of images, I returned an hour later with a wider-angle setup: Olympus E-M1iii camera + Laowa 7.5mm f/2 lens.  Now, however, as I was framing the first image I realized that I could see the red glow.  And it was getting brighter!  For the next 10 to 15 minutes the northern lights put on a good show easily visible to the unaided eye.  A curtain of red with green spikes shimmered over Creede and the La Garita mountains.  Just as I decided this was worth waking up the neighbors for them to see, the northern lights faded back into invisibility.  Show over.

11:23 pm MDT.  Laowa 7.5mm f/2, no filter.

In this image there are two separate phenomena visible:  the auroral curtain over Creede, and higher up in the sky a much fainter red band called a SAR (Stable Auroral Red) arc.

11:26 pm MDT.  Laowa 7.5mm f/2 with Hoya Softon filter.

11:29 pm MDT.  Laowa 7.5mm f/2, softon filter.

11:31 pm MDT.

In the next post I will show some of the earlier photos when all of this was still invisible to the unaided eye.

As usual, clicking on an image gets you into gallery view, from which you can access the full-size version.