October 2, 2015 Auroras
Grand Rapids, Minnesota
Solar wind conditions looked good again, and the moon was in its waning phase, so I decided to head out to find auroras. In the evening, the magnetic field vector pointed a little more north, so my hopes of seeing anything started to dim, but soon enough, it flipped back south, and I figured the auroras would soon appear.
In the meantime, I took a hike on the Joyce Estate trail in the Chippewa National Forest. The evening twilight was wonderful, and I stopped to take a few pictures of the fading twilight and the emerging Milky Way.
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| The evening twilight fades over Moore Lake in the Chippewa National Forest. |
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| The Milky Way emerges. I enhanced contrast on this shot. |
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| Here's the same shot without contrast enhancement. |
I swung around to Pughole Lake, where I could barely see enough of the northern horizon that the green glow was very slightly perceptibe. I mean BARELY. I took a few shots, and I show two of them here. One is because it shows a couple meteors, of which there were many, and the other shows the northern lights at their most intense while I was at this spot.
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| A very dim green glow on the northern horizon and at least a couple meteors in this shot. |
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| This is the best the auroras showed me in the 30 minutes I was here at Pughole Lake. |
While I was there, the magnetic field vector continued to point south, but it was getting late, and I was a bit deficient on sleep, so I decided to return home and set up the camera on my roof. I was expecting to find the camera in the morning with a nice show recorded on it, but when I stepped out onto the porch in the morning, I saw that the roof was completely frosted up, and after the frost melted, and I could finally retrieve the camera, the pictures showed the lights faded and that the camera quickly fogged up. I got a couple decent pictures, though.
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| Auroras from the rooftop after I had gone to bed. |
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