Auroras deep south again (October 10th 2024)

The odds are stacked against me getting good aurora photos. Light pollution. Surrounded by trees. Terrible low light capabilities on my camera. But here’s my view of the aurora in Upstate South Carolina.

https://i.postimg.cc/LXWW9MWW/IMG-20241010-213208598.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/kg973xKb/IMG-20241010-213440725.jpg


https://i.postimg.cc/zXw1jV6X/IMG-20241010-221041073.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/pdrbRkTp/IMG-20241010-221315330.jpg

Very cool!
I went outside to take a look, but I think the sky is far too bright out this way.

I saw the aurora last night. From right outside my front door, and the back door too. Incredible that it looked the same all the way down in South Carolina.

Southern Alberta here, but I saw nothing tonight. Well, we’ve been having a little bit of cloud cover, so I guess I didn’t expect much.

But I’m glad that our more southern friends got to see the auroras. I’ve often seen them. They’re quite something, aren’t they? The way they ripple and change shape—it’s almost magical.

I took a gander, but there were too many trees in the way.

Now we get auroras? I was on an Arctic cruise two weeks ago, from Hamburg to North Cape and back, and all we got to see was a few pale white lines, for one evening only, when we were well into the Arctic Circle. I want my money back.

(No I don’t. The cruise was great and Norway is beautiful).

I was about to go to bed when my son called and told me to go outside and look at the auroras. I had never seen an aurora before.

They didn’t show up very well on my cell phone’s camera. My son took this pic.

We’re in south-eastern Pennsylvania, for what it’s worth.

Southwest Pennsylvania, my gf woke me up at midnight to see the cool sky.

I couldn’t tell whether I was seeing pale uncolored aurora, or ordinary background light pollution. The pattern looked different to me than usual, but there didn’t seem to be any motion.

The Mrs. and I watched the aurora from our hot tub last night. We’ve seen it before here, but last night was the first time we were able to see colors. Previously we’d seen only shades of white undulating across the sky. So the pink-red hues mixed with white bands were quite exciting to watch. We’re above 44 degrees latitude here.

There was no obvious motion that I saw. The lights did move in place in the sky, getting brighter and darker and changing shape over minutes. The red color in small areas of the sky didn’t resemble anything similar from light pollution or real pollution that I’ve seen. It could be the best I’ll ever get to see unless the magnetosphere is about to go as insane as the weather and the political climate.

I thought I had read somewhere that this is going to be a good year for aurora viewing. We are visiting Scotland next month and that’s the number one thing on my list.

I saw them in northeast Ohio, looked mostly like @kayaker’s pic, but we also had a little bit of green. There’s a lot of light pollution where I’m at so I couldn’t see them with my eyes but they showed up just fine with my cell phone camera. It was neat to see with the stars! I think the last time we saw them earlier this year it was a bit cloudy.

Being in a horribly light polluted area I went to one of the beaches as at least I’d get a couple of miles of no lights in front of me. There are two nearby beach/parks & all parks close at sunset. I went to the closer one because it is a) closer & b) has nearby parking outside of the park. Luckily they kept it open late but unfortunately there is parking right up to the edge of the beach.

When I got there it was very faint, I wasn’t even sure if I was seeing it in the camera but then; OMG it flared up again & we everyone could see it with our naked eyes. I made sure I was getting some timelapse as I know we wouldn’t really be able to see the dancing with our naked eyes.

One obnoxious @#$%& in a BMW (redundant, I know) pulled up to the front row & kept her headlights on. It was definitely affecting my photos. I yelled something from where I was on the beach probably 75 or more yards away but with the wind I’m sure the driver couldn’t hear me. Since I was shooting timelapse, I let the camera be for a minute & walked over to the car to ask the driver to turn out their lights. I got near the car, which I could hear was running(!) & said, “Hey, can you turn out your lights, it’s affecting our pictures” when a woman walked up & says something like Relax or Chill out & then gets into the SUV. Walking back to my camera no fewer than 5 people said something to me. - Thanks! Way to go! You said what I was thinking!

Timelapse motion

Saw the forecasts, thought about going to a dark sky site but everyplace within two hours drive was 70-80% clouds. So stayed home, went to the store. Got home around 8:30 and there was a gap in the clouds to the north east. Great red columns with some white/bluish. That gap closed up, drove up the canyon to a darker spot, saw nothing but clouds. Back home and had another good spot by the cemetary. Feel like I saw this one, where I missed out back in May by going to bed half an hour before it really got good.

Your link is giving a 503 error.

We had a couple of clear nights when the aurora was supposed to be visible, but I saw zip. And I’m in Oregon, go figure. It was the same the previous time too.

That’s weird, that’s the second time lately that hosting site has randomly deleted a set of my images (never mind that Discourse is random whether it embeds them or not). I won’t try reupping them all to Imgur (which is flakey for me) but here’s the best of the group, which shows both red and green patches.

(That is from my phone’s “night mode”, which a check of the EXIF shows to be ISO-16896, 1/6s.)