Comet Neowise and the Auroras
Lake Winnibigoshish, Minnesota
This was not what I was expecting the night to look like. My schedule earlier in the day was to attend a nonprofit board meeting (where the meetings often have a lot of heated arguments). Furthermore, this meeting was happening during a severe weather event in which I expected a few tornadoes to occur. I would much rather have been out chasing this event, but I was stuck at the board meeting instead.
I cheated a bit and brought up my iPhone's radar near the end of the meeting, and I saw a big line of storms and no tornado reports. That was one bit of relief for me. At least I had not missed a particularly noteworthy severe weather event. The skies were also darkening outside, and the line of storms was approaching the Grand Rapids area.
I had brought my cameras with me, so rather than proceed directly home (which, actually, was not much out of the way), I drove west of Cohasset and watched the line of storms approach. The lightning was very frequent-- nearly continuous, but it was almost all intracloud lightning, and there were very few bolts of lightning visible. I let this line of storms approach then decided to drive home before the heavy precipitation hit. I was a couple blocks from home when the wall of heavy rain hit me.
While waiting for the storms to pass, I checked on radar and on the solar wind data. The solar wind data told me the auroras would be visible if I could find clear skies. With these strong storms, the cirroform anvils were spreading out, but the storms were also moving east, so there was hope for some clearing if I drove west on Highway 2 toward Lake Winnibigoshish. I hopped in the car and drove west again, past where I had watched the line of storms approach.
When I got to somewhere around Ball Club, I could see stars in the southern and western sky. I needed to see them in the northern sky, too. I decided to check out the visibility from Ball Club Lake, but I missed the driveway to the lake access, so I just kept on rolling, thinking that if there was partial clearing this far east, then good sky conditions at Winnie were assured.
About 20 minutes later, after the relatively lengthy drive through the Chippewa National Forest on Highway 2, I turned north into the boat landing, hoping to find nobody there. Well, there were a couple of small vans belonging to some sort of business, but their owners were either sleeping or were somewhere else entirely. I had the landing, more or less, to myself. I hopped out of the car to check the visibility of the horizon across the lake.
What met my eyes brought out a torrent of expletives, preceeded by the word "holy". I can't remember whether I already had my camera with me or not, but I do remember dashing back to the car to grab some more equipment so I could do a decent time lapse. Looking back at my picture timestamps and metadata, I now remember that I had the camera with me, and was set up on tripod, but I had the 16-35mm f2.8 lens, and I ran back to get the 24mm f1.4 lens and the shutter release (actually, I just grabbed the camera bag, which had both these items). Although there was no reason to believe the event would disappear very quickly (like a tornado would), I nevertheless hurried to get everything set up and to start taking pictures.
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| This is the first picture I took. In my haste, I had the wrong lens, but I felt I had to snap a picture before going back to the car. |
Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you what I saw. It was a nice auroral arc, with Comet Neowise slicing right through it. I had seen several comets during my life, including Hyakutake (1996) Hale-Bopp (1997), and Pan-Starrs (2013). Perhaps I didn't catch those at their maximum brightness, but none of them were so immediately apparent to the naked eye as Neowise was when I hopped out of the car.
I set up the camera for a time lapse, eventually wishing that I had also brought my second camera and a bigger CF card. My 32 GB flash card eventually filled up, reminding me of the March 11, 2011 auroras when the flash card filled up the precise moment when the substorm began. This time, the substorm had faded somewhat, and I had a second, albeit smaller, flash card with me. I could be picky about choosing when to hit the shutter release by this time. The brightest auroras had already happened, but there were some nice structures still developing.
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| Picture with the 24mm f1.4 after taking the time to choose better settings. |
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| The auroras brighten and start to actively move across the horizon. |
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| The substorm calms down, but the auroras expand across the sky. |
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| The auroral arc consolidates again, but there is a cloud moving in. |
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| Again, some picturesque structure appears. |
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| Again, some picturesque structure appears. |
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| Auroras appear to line up with the comet's tail. |
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| Aurora Tail. |