Trout Lake Auroras
March 21, 2015
It was a beautiful, clear night with a new moon, so I decided to go out and get a nice time lapse of the Milky Way. Winter was on its way out, so this would likely be the last time (or one of the last times) I'd be able to shoot on a lake before the ice melted. Additionally, the solar wind and geomagnetic conditions were unsettled, which would make for a nice, green glow of auroras on the horizon, so I picked a lake that was dark and large enough to see the horizon. My choice was Trout Lake in the Chippewa National Forest.
Getting to the location required a hike of nearly a mile from the nearest road, and the hike was mostly along cross-country ski trails, where the snow had already melted for the season. The last 200 meters was a hike through the woods down to the lake.
On my way there, I decided to step onto Moore Lake, where the ice on northern shoreline had not yet become weak enough to impede access to the lake. I walked out around the island and took several long exposures. I could see a little bit of zodiacal light, which I don't see too often, so I pointed the camera that way to try to capture it.
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| Milky Way, looking west. A little bit of zodiacal light appears in the center of the image between the Milky Way and the horizon. |
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| Turning around and looking north, I see the horizon starting to glow a bit. Time to photograph the auroras! |
Once I had take a few shots, I got back on the trail and was on Trout Lake in a few minutes. On the way, a bright auroral band developed a bit higher in the sky than I expected because the magnetic field was really not very far south. The last bit of the hike through the woods seemed to take forever, as if the woods extended itself as I was hiking, and the lake was always another 50 yards away. Finally, I stepped onto the lake, set up my first camera, and looked for a way to set up a second camera because I had only brought one tripod on the hike.
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| The main auroral oval brightens along the northern horizon while a second band appears much farther south. |
There, I stayed with my cameras for about three hours while the Milky Way slowly rotated around the North Star. Although the temperature was not too cold (in the upper teens above zero), this felt like one of the coldest aurora shoots of the season because (as the still images do not reveal) there was a rather brisk northerly breeze, and I had a good fetch of lake to my north. I had to run around to stay warm! The southern auroral "blobs" faded, and the northern horizon auroras brightened and came a bit farther south, causing me to cut back on the exposure time of the camera (in retrospect, I did not really have to do that, and the time lapse is always a bit less smooth with any change I make to the camera settings). I small substorm developed, and I switched my second camera to a faster interval to capture the moving columns of light.
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| The main auroral oval brightens along the northern horizon (16 mm). |
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| A weak substorm at 24mm. |
Around 2:00 A.M., the auroras morphed into their typical late-night, post-substorm blobular mode, so I decided to pack it up and start hiking back to the parking area. The hike warmed me up by the time I got back to the car. I drove home, but apparently, I wasn't done shooting for the night. A new southern auroral "blob" appeared to my east-southeast. I was tired, so I only glanced at out my left window as I was driving south. I decided I would shoot it if it was still there when I got home.
When I got home, I could not find it through the trees in my back yard, which were a little taller to the southeast than they were directly to the east, so I started to put my cameras away. As I was getting ready for bed, I glanced out the window again and saw another band to my southwest, so I grabbed the camera gear and shot a quick time lapse. It's always fun to do that from home!
By 4:05 AM, I was in bed and ready for a few hours sleep.
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| A "blobular" auroral band to my southwest. |