Obligatory Aurora Pics
This week's post was going to be all about yesterday's trip to The Lake District which yielded some nice images, despite being a bright sunny day, but last night's events changed that plan.
I've captured faint aurora pictures here in Lancashire, before, but last night was astounding. Not only did the camera pick it up rather well, but you could clearly see the shape and colours with the naked eye. Even weirder, rather than a faint band along the northern horizon, most of the action here was directly overhead, even pointing the camera South captured some interesting details.
According to aurora watch the solar storm is still blazing away as I type this, so we may even get another show tonight.
These images were taken between 23:00 and 01:30 last night / this morning. I ended up going through them until 03:00 this morning, followed by about four hours sleep, so I feel like death today, but it was well worth it. Regular viewers may recognise some of these locations. This is just a small selection of the images from last night as I'm sure the thread will be awash with this sort of thing before the day is out, but let me know if you want to see any more as I have loads of them.
All images taken entirely in manual mode with the Nikon Z8 and 14-30 f/4.0S lens (manual focus, 13sec exposure at f/8 as ISO 1600). Processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23. I did try running a few through Topaz to clean up the noise, but it just introduced additional artefacts, so I discarded those. As the aurora action was mostly directly above us, most of my images ended up in portrait orientation to try and fit as much of the higher angled sky in the shot as possible.