David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of nature and the natural world. Plants, animals, and wildlife from around the world.
Six-Years Ago Today. Northern Red Cardinal. (04-Dec-2018, New Jersey).
The solar disk was observed with a Vespera Pro telescope (250 mm, f/5, 1400 microseconds) using a Solar filter. The sun is near the solar maximum period of the 11-year solar sunspot cycle. The image is cropped to 1204 x 1204 pixels with the apparent diameter of the sun a little less than 0.54°. Processing the image using Topaz AI (noise reduction or sharpening) or AutoStakkert4 (image stacking) did not improve the image.
Nine-Years Ago Today. Red fox on the side of the road with a road-killed deer. (01-Dec-2015, New Jersey)
The camera in the Stellina telescope stopped working. I’ll be contacting Vaonis support to try and figure out what is wrong. So tonight, I only have the Vespera-Pro telescope capturing images of the comet. The magnitude is now 9.6. The first image is a composite of 31 images (5 min 10 sec) and the second one is a composite of 247 images (41 min 20 sec). In the second image there is some movement of the comet head. Also, the comet is moving into a region of the sky with part of the milky way in the background (many more faint stars).
The sky started out clear and sunny with clouds coming in later in the day. The Stellina telescope was fitted with a solar filter and set to observe the sun and sunspots. While reviewing a time-lapse video of the 18500 images (7h 45m compressed down to 10m 15s) I noticed the silhouette of a couple of jets and a bird (Turkey Vulture). Let me know if you see anything else (other than clouds) passing in front of the sun. It was windy with leaves falling from the trees. Even though it is Halloween, I didn’t catch a silhouette of a witch on a broom flying past the sun. By evening, the sky clouded over, so no images of the comet or other night sky objects.
On Wednesday, Sunspot AR3848 sent a powerful solar flare directly toward earth. Based on the intensity and length of the coronal mass ejections (CME), NOAA and NASA forecasted that it could cause a severe G-4 class geomagnetic storm, with the possibility of auroras being visible further south than usual. The CME arrived on Thursday generating multiple alerts.
I went outside a little after 7 PM to possibly set up a camera to capture the Northern Lights. I don’t have a good view of the horizon to the north and hoped to see something above the trees. I wasn’t expecting anything this early as it was just dark out. To my amazement the sky looking north was bright red, and when I looked to the east and then south saw the typical aurora green. The display was everywhere, even straight up. It was much brighter than I expected, easily visible to the eye, not just with a digital camera. I wasn’t sure which direction to point the camera. I ended up setting up several cameras with wide angle lenses pointing different directions, including one with a fisheye lens with a 180° view pointing straight up. Each camera was set to take images every 30 seconds (30 second exposure, f/8, ISO 1600). Even though I missed some of the initial brightest display, I left the cameras out for several more hours. They did come back several times. I used the images to create the following time lapse videos.
