So, [you ask because you’re following everything I post with due excitement] how did Monday morning’s pursuit of the Leonids and aurora borealis go? And I, being the suspicious type that tries to detect subtle impish questions that you already know the answer to, pause just long enough to convey this suspicion before plowing ahead anyway.
In short, no better than any other time I’ve tried this, which is to say, I accomplished nothing that I’d be distraught about if I accidentally deleted the images from the folders. There were just two visible instances that we even had a ‘shower,’ which isn’t impressive at all since I’ve seen more during non-showers when I used to walk the roads at night in central New York. One was literally as far from the camera’s view as possible and still actually be visible, exactly opposite the direction the camera was aimed and right on the horizon. The other, less than 2 minutes later, was only 120° off-axis. Both were so brief and short that I would have recorded only a short streak in the 18mm focal length I was using, had they actually occurred where I was aiming. I gave it up after roughly an hour.
As for the aurora? Perhaps ever so slightly better than that, but in concept only. This was the view to the north:
First off, there’s a town up there about 25 km away, so I expected a certain amount of glow from the horizon, but if you look close, there’s some faint pinkish banding within that glow, plus the glow is a little more green than I’d expect from either current LED streetlamps or the old sodium ones that tended to be amber-ish. That part may be only imaginary, really. But I boosted saturation in this image just to see what happened:
There certainly seems to be a little banding in there, and it’d be easy to put this down to faint clouds if a) they were the color of reflected city lights, b) it wasn’t past midnight and thus far from sunset or sunrise colors, and c) this wasn’t due north (go ahead, find Ursa Major slightly right of center.) So to the question of whether I had any luck, I’d say, Yessssss, with this tone that indicated more No but not a complete No. In other words, Big deal who cares?
Along those same lines, I will throw in here that, as of the previous post, we’re now running second in the number of images uploaded within a year, and with six weeks to go, first is within the realm of possibility. As for the actual number of posts within a year, that’s well out of reach – I’d have to do almost two posts every day from here on to beat 2021, so no, not aiming for that. But to add to the image count (and because I never posted this back when it was semi-topical,) I throw down this 61-second exposure of a die-hard Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis,) the one that can always be found on the dead Japanese maple unless it’s bitterly cold in the evening – this was taken strictly by moonlight, and in fact, super moonlight. You can tell, can’t you? Just like that ‘aurora’ up there…
