The night of 10-11th of May 2024 was certainly memorable, not just for me but for the millions of people across the world who were lucky enough to have witnessed the aurora borealis/australis triggered by the arrival of multiple coronal mass ejections emanating from the huge (15x Earth widths) sunspot AR3664, which I had imaged just the day before.
This was the most powerful geomagnetic storm since 2003, initially forecast to be a G4 (severe) storm it soon was upgraded to G5 (extreme) level, which is the most powerful level.
I have seen the aurora on several occasions, all from my home county of Hampshire in southern England, but of all those displays only 1 or 2 have been visible to my eyes, the rest have only shown in digital photos.
This was something different, the aurora was easily visible to the naked eye, even from urban locations, when I saw it before we had to drive out to a more rural spot to escape the light pollution.
But here in a park between the cites of Southampton and Winchester I could clearly see vertical shafts of diffuse light rippling and swaying, fading and brightening on the northern horizon, stretching from north east to north west, even more incredible it was visible to the south west as well, and up to the zenith, although I could only pick that up in my camera. I am glad I got an image of that as despite it not being as colourful as the rest of the display it radiates out from a single point roughly at the zenith and I have just learnt that this is called an auroral corona which as I understand is quite rare (probably not so for places further north that see aurora more frequently)
Ironically because of the time of year the places where it is more commonly seen don't get dark enough, some places north of the arctic circle the sun barely sets, so for once it was more favourable to be further south.
It was also a very colourful display, the aurorae I have imaged before tended to be either reddish or greenish, or both but this night there were hues of pinks, violet, blues plus the usual red and green colours.
Of course the colours appear more vivid in photos but to the eye you could make out subtle hints of colour.
At some point I decided to take a sequence of photos and try to stich them together to create a time lapse, first time I have done that with aurora and I have learned that I need to take more images and make the interval between each frame much shorter to make the end result flow more naturally but it does at least give an impression of the movement of the beams and how they fade and brighten.
I hope it is not another 20 years until I can have another chance to make a better timelapse.
Негізгі бет Ғылым және технология Aurora Borealis from southern England
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