About 86K Big dipper handle,
lower right corner
About 87K
About 100k
Tuesday the 28th my brother Alex saw a story on Slashdot about an X17.4 class solar flare, with predictions for large geomagnetic storms. They said we could have Aurora visible well down into the Continental US. I think they linked to the NOAA Space Weather site.. there's a lot of good info there. Other sites with good information and forcasting is hosted by Univ. of Alaska Poker Flat Research Range. and also Solar Terrestrial Dispatch
Unfortunately, forcasted weather was cloudy... but we looked outside on Tuesday, at about 11PM and saw some broken clouds to the North. Ok.. we're there.
We headed out Skyline Blvd, up over Forest Park, out to about mile 14, and found a spot with a bit of a north view.
Here are some of the pictures that statically approximate what we saw.
It was an incredible experience.. a large area of sky would be green for
a minute... then in the space of 2 secs, shift to red... I could also see some
thin streaks.
|
|
|
|
About 86K Big dipper handle, | About 87K | About 100k |
Sadly, the Portland Tribune said they had their own pictures. If they did, they didn't publish them.
I wasn't happy with the quality of these pictures... We prepared a little better for the next couple nights, unfortunately the weather, (solar and local) didn't cooperate with us. Wednesday night we put a couple hundred miles on the car, got rained all the way out to Clatskenie, came back East and spent a freezing hour at the top of Larch Mountain in sort of a cloud.
Thursday night we went out again on Skyline... farther out. Much clearer, but not as much solar weather. We saw some very faint aurora, we may have caught some of it.
Tuesday night we left in a hurry, Camera was a Nikon FE with a Nikkor 50mm
1.4 lens. on a tripod No filter. Film was Kodak Max 400 (kodakcolor consumer
film) I attempted to measure the light with a Gossen Luna-Pro. Was not able
to get the needle much off of zero so I cautioned Alex that I did not have
much experience taking pictures in the
take pictures in the dark, Wasn't real scientific about it, wide open at
f1.4 took a few pictures. between 1-3 minutes and one If I remember right I
only exposed for a few seconds. (this one was severely underexposed)
Wednesday morning Alex pushed me into having the film processed, I was trying
to convince him that we couldn't possibly get anything becuase the Luna Pro
said it was dark. The phrase "Plenty of light" means something completely
different for a photographer than an amateur astromomer. So I strolled around
downtown taking some candids/ etc in the rain and took the film to a 1-hour
place. To my surprise the frames left open for a minute or more were fully, in
fact quite a bit overexposed. Color PRINT film will take a beating as far as
overexposure is concerned... Alex liked the pictures.
Wednesday and Thursday
nights we were all prepared with the Hasselblad 500cm and Fujichrome Provia
400 "slide film" and a rented Gitzo tripod, under which we hung 16 pounds of
weight. Unfortunately due being this well prepared there was no light show.
Hassy's (80mm zeiss planar) lens wide open is f2.8- but with the overexposure
of tuesday night I thought it would be OK- Fujichrome Superia 400 in the
Nikon
I guess I'm going into much too much detail here. My reccomendations would be
to use the fastest lens you have wide open and BLH (bracket like hell)
(Folks with zoom lenses, see you at the camera swap meet tomorrow finding
your 50mm prime!)
The light show was great, it would send streakes in the sky, sit for 2
minutes and then change, showing "neon" red, green and blue. Wish it would
stay around long enough for me to do a better job with the photography, But I
suppose that is what makes it "special" is that it doesnt happen all the
time.
Fred
