Another two part one this week – we’ll start off slow.
While I had been seeing some news alerts that the aurora borealis might be visible in several northern states, I paid little heed to them since North Carolina, despite its name, is far from being considered a ‘northern’ state. Then The Girlfriend’s Sprog told me that we might actually be seeing a display here, and I made it a point to get out to a dark sky location with a decent-ish view to the north – which is harder in this area than I imagined. I did numerous time exposures aimed north at various exposure settings, as well as some not aimed north, for the sake of it. And while chimping at the resulting exposures gave an indication that some light was there on the horizon, I wasn’t convinced that this was any evidence of the aurora itself.
However, the following day I saw some photos from others at this same latitude that had a better view north and did indeed capture a nice pink glow, so it’s safe to say that this is what produced the light here. Certainly not a stunning (or even interesting) display, but evidence that it can be seen at extreme times all the way down here.
I could easily have credited this to light pollution from nearby sources, though I’ve never seen it this hue and it was notably different from the glow in other directions. By naked eye, this color could not be made out at all, so not in any way a nice display.
But I did a 20-minute exposure for giggles, unfortunately with less-than-ideal settings that blew it out a bit, so I ended up tweaking the image in GIMP for a more fartistic version.
That was part one. Part two was captured last night down at the pond, when some uncommon noises attracted the attention of The Girlfriend and I.
The headlamp in tightly-focused spotlight mode is just barely adequate for video at short to moderate distances, provided I can keep it on the subject while also keeping the camera trained that way, which requires watching the LCD screen on the back which my personal focus range doesn’t want to permit easily – to be sure everything’s sharp, I usually end up using my inherent myopia and looking over top of my glasses at the screen, which naturally starts aiming the headlamp in the wrong direction. This is not a working solution.
The microphone, by the way, was the same Takstar SGC-598 used here, but damn it was picking up too much of the ambient noise – the cars weren’t half as close as they sound in the video. I should have gone with the Azden shotgun mic, but there wasn’t time to affix it to the video cage. The video light that I have (and did use for the latter clips when it decided to work again – don’t know why it balked initially) is an LED model with a broader view, ideal for macro work, but not focused for any distance. And yes, the video monitor seen at that link would help with focusing, but not with keeping the headlamp aimed correctly.
The beavers, meanwhile, were initially willing to ignore the bright lights and the occasional odd sounds coming from The Girlfriend and I, but eventually began to believe that this might not be kosher. It’s a shame that I wasn’t prepared for video right from the start, because on first finding one of them (which I believe might have been this year’s offspring,) I watched it stuff its head into a tangle of water reeds and plow around after something in there, venting a little grunt/whimper of frustration – this helped support the idea of it being young, since I’ve never heard the adults make any noise save for some teeth chattering as a warning if approached too close.
But, yeah, I have some improvements to make if I intend to pursue these kind of subjects with video. We’ll see how that goes…