Yeah, I'm also seeing incredible photos on the web. The photos might be enhanced, but it seems the aurora is even showing near bright areas.
All for thee, . . . but not for me . . .
Friday night was nearly bust for me. For darkness and getting light reflections in the water, I drove up to the NY Lake Ontario shore. Unfortunately, way across the lake, there was still a LOT of light spill from Toronto. But the worse thing was the cloud cover, 95-99% cloud cover. Groaaan. In between clouds, I photographed some very, very small splotches of purple and green light that my camera picked up (better than my naked eye). But hardly profound. I'll upload photo later. But they reported that the lights would continue to be seen on Sat and Sun, so I wasn't too disappointed, . . .
Sat night, rain was everywhere. (The sun god Ra is still punishing me. Talk about grudges, . . . will someone tell me what I did to deserve this?!) So didn't try at all.
Oh uh, MAYBE one more chance on Sunday night . . .
As of right now, they say Sunday night still has good possibility for northern states to see the lights IF the sky is clear. Its currently rated as "G4," with potential G5 later. This time I'll go east between Buffalo and Rochester. The light maps show this area as pretty dark.
Not taking any chances, I am pledging my soul to Ra, and offering my first three offsprings. He'll have to allow it because I will have the most sincere photo patch, . . . and he respects sincerity.
I hereby renounce all loyalty and pledges to the god Ra!
Well, I tried.
Last night (Sunday night) I drove east towards Rochester. Found a parking space along a remote nature preservation area in total darkness. Had about 1-2 hours of mostly clear skies before the clouds rolled over. I could see stars. It was a long shot as solar activity had diminished, . . . but alas, all in vain, . . . the northern lights stiffed me again.
'Curse you Ra, . . . damn you all to hell!'
The photo below is from Friday night. It looks MUCH better than actuality. The photo needed a whopping 30 second exposure to capture the colors. The bright lights from Toronto across the lake didn't help. In reality my eyes mostly saw dark grey clouds. A rather disappointing experience:
Next time, maybe I should just allow the northern lights to come to me . . .
“Aurora Borealis! At this time of year! At this time of day! In this part of the country! Localized entirely within your kitchen!”
We missed the show on Friday. We scouted locations Saturday afternoon and sat in our chosen site from midnight until 4 AM and didn't see anything.
I ran across this posted on Facebook from Joseph Shaw, Distinguished Professor and Director at Montana State University, Studied Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona:
quote:With so many aurora photos showing up online, I’m seeing a lot of discussion and even disappointment about the difference between what you see with your eye and what we see in the photos. I’m also seeing a lot of partial answers that miss some of the most important issues. So, let me explain…
1) You need enough brightness to trigger your color vision. Human vision uses two fundamentally different types of detectors: rods that provide high-gain black-and-white vision and lower-gain cones that provide color vision when there is sufficiently bright light. High-latitude auroras (like the one shown here from Sodankyla, Finland) are often bright enough to be seen with your “photopic (color) vision, so you see with your eyes a scene that is quite similar to what a camera records. In fact, in those cases, you see the colors even better than the camera because of point #2.
2) You are actually better than a camera at resolving subtle details in the presence of brighter light. Human vision has a logarithmic response while a digital camera is highly linear. This means you can simultaneously see bright and dark regions in a scene, but a photographer generally has to compromise between saturating bright regions and revealing darker regions. This is why sunset and twilight photos are almost always accompanied by the phrase, “it looked even better in person!” This means that, no matter how hard you try or what camera you use, you’ll never really faithfully record what you see.
3) A camera can collect light longer than your eyes, so it can reveal colors that you can’t see. A camera shutter can remain open for a long time to record colors that are too dim to be seen well (or at all) by eye. This means that a photographer faces a choice between trying to record a dim scene as would have been seen by a human or recording an image that reveals the visually hidden or muted colors. For example, even a modest exposure time can reveal green and red in a dim aurora that looked faintly white to your eyes.
4) Digital images can be added together to increase brightness with less noise, Something astronomers and astrophotographers have done for decades is to capture many short-exposure images and then”stack” them (add them up) to make a single image with an effectively long exposure time. This has the benefit of increasing the desired signal while averaging out some of the undesired noise. This is what cellphone cameras do when used in “night mode” or the equivalent. This allows you to record an image with reasonable quality using a tiny sensor and tiny lens that would together otherwise be incapable of recording such a faint scene. Human vision can’t accomplish this trick, so even your phone camera can record colors that you can’t see.
5) Digital images are easily altered to show a scene more or less similar to what a human could see. A computer can drastically alter the apparent brightness, saturation, or even color balance of an image. That can be done in a laptop or desktop computer after the image is captured or it can be done in your camera. Done very carefully, these tools can correct for subtle failures of the camera to initially record a scene similar to what you saw, However, these tools can be, and often are, used to create completely unrealistic color balance or fidelity. When this is done by the photographer, this is a user error (or possibly artistic design choice). When it is done by the camera algorithms, my opinion is that it’s a camera design flaw. For example, in the quest to capture larger market share, some cell phone manufacturers design their cameras with algorithms that automatically increase color saturation in ways that improve some photos while making others garish and entirely inaccurate. Because of this, I strongly encourage all aurora photographers to only use phone cameras as spot checks, recording their “real” aurora images with cameras that allow fully manual control. This, of course, only works if the photographer then only uses post processing very carefully.
Conclusion Cameras are tools that must be used carefully and with honest disclosure of exposure settings and digital manipulation. Phone cameras are generally much less reliable for this kind of photography because they don’t tell you what has been done digitally to produce the image you see. Finally, if you are unhappy about not being able to see colors as brightly or with the purity being shown in photos, go to a high-latitude (ideally >55 degrees latitude) location where auroras can be seen by eye pretty much how I’ve shown here!
Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that it has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --Percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
Why should anyone debate someone who doesn't know the subject? -- AZPaul3
If you are going to argue that evolution is false because it resembles your own beliefs then perhaps you should rethink your argument. - - Taq
Sorry you missed it Tany. It is a little disheartening to not see anything that so many other people have joyfully experienced.
Interesting about the facebook post. I already imagined that smart phones are auto-enhancing photos. But still, surely the environment must have SOME role in the quality of photos, eh?
Oh well, . . . the sun continues to fission, we will get more chanceS. Concurrent with man's search for meaning in a world of deceptive appearances and fatal delusions, . . . the hunt for the white whale WILL continue.
Re: I hereby renounce all loyalty and pledges to the god Ra!
Tried to see if they were out last night, it was cloudless night, but we were under a smoke advisory. The air was hazy and smoky from forest fires in British Columbia. I could barely see stars.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up, why would you have to lie?
okay, forget the extra-terrestrial phenomena . . .
Since I'm not doing so good photographing or experiencing the celestial stuff, maybe I should look inward to mother earth's supernatural wonders . . .
quote:Right now, something magical is underway across vast stretches of the eastern US.
The soil is beginning to erupt with trillions of periodical cicadas that have been growing underground for either 13 or 17 years, waiting for this exact moment to crawl out of the Earth together.
This particular burst of life is incredibly rare. The two groups that are emerging, known as Brood XIX and Brood XIII, appear together just once every 221 years.
See that, every 221 years, very rare. Much much much rarer than a dumb ol' total eclipse or northern light storm.
Okay Tany, this is your bailiwick, what are the parameters to photograph this subject? Any Cicadoidean filter made by Tiffen? There's nothing to stop me now, I'll go ahead and make my airplane reservation on Spirit Airlines.
Re: okay, forget the extra-terrestrial phenomena . . .
Okay Tany, this is your bailiwick, what are the parameters to photograph this subject?
Well, photographing most insects I use the same basic setup, but my actual settings only work with my camera, a Nikon D700 (I have 3 D700 camera bodies) and lens, a 200mm Micro-Nikkor on a tripod. This is an old camera body made between 2008 and 2012. It has Nikon's first full frame sensor, 24x36mm, manufactured by Panasonic, later sensors were manufactured by Sony. It is 12 megapixels and the only sensor that I can shoot stopped all the way down to f32 without having the image blurred slightly by an optical affect called diffraction. Diffraction affects higher resolution sensors that have pixels more densely packed, much more than the D700, which I call the perfect dragonfly camera.
So, in the field, I always shoot insects at f32 with an ISO of 640, the shutter speed automatically varies to give my the proper exposure.
I have never photographed cicadas and have only experienced a mass emergence once, during a dragonfly symposium at East Tennessee State University in 1989. The volume of noise was dramatic! I was surprised to learn there are actually 7 species involved in the 13 & 17 year cicadas. That makes this a much more complex system.
Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that it has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --Percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
Why should anyone debate someone who doesn't know the subject? -- AZPaul3
If you are going to argue that evolution is false because it resembles your own beliefs then perhaps you should rethink your argument. - - Taq
This is an old camera body made between 2008 and 2012.
Old? My camera body, an Olympus OM-2, is from 1981, but there's no longer a wide selection of film. Kodachrome has been discontinued. You can still get Tri-X if you're doing B&W, and it's easy to develop yourself.
Re: okay, forget the extra-terrestrial phenomena . . .
Yeah, I still have my old Nikon bodies, 2 F2s, an F3 and an F5. Plus a darkroom with a color enlarger (we printed mostly Cibachromes up to 16x20), but my wife turned it into her computer lab after we stopped printing. I still had a couple hundred rolls of Kodachrome in the freezer that I finally threw out a couple years ago. I was scanning my slides for years before the first affordable dslr cameras came out.
Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that it has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --Percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
Why should anyone debate someone who doesn't know the subject? -- AZPaul3
If you are going to argue that evolution is false because it resembles your own beliefs then perhaps you should rethink your argument. - - Taq
Re: okay, forget the extra-terrestrial phenomena . . .
Hey Tany,
I know about diffraction, but I didn't know that any camera (the D700) mostly overcame the problem. Cool. Is there a camera that can be purchased today that is equivalent to the D700, or has this problem been fixed by all today's DSLRs?
tany writes:
The volume of noise [of the cicadas] was dramatic!
Yeah, tell me about it. About 10 years ago I visited southern China during the summer. It was incredibly hot/humid, I had major jetlag/sleepless-irritability (12 time zones), . . . and the SCREAMING cicadas wouldn't shut the hell up.
Forget the 'Chinese-water-torture,' the cicadas should have been featured in Chinese torture mythology.
Re: okay, forget the extra-terrestrial phenomena . . .
I know about diffraction, but I didn't know that any camera (the D700) mostly overcame the problem. Cool. Is there a camera that can be purchased today that is equivalent to the D700, or has this problem been fixed by all today's DSLRs?
I don't think there is a camera being manufactured today that solves the diffraction problem. Over the past year D700 bodies with low shutter activation counts have been showing up on the used camera markets and I managed to acquire 3 bodies with shutter activations under 4000, so almost brand new, for myself and my 2 best friends for about $400 each. We each have 3 now. I check every week or so at Just a moment...
As far as I know, there is no other full frame camera with only 12 megapixels, everything else has denser pixels which magnifies diffraction issues. I also have a Nikon D810 (36mp) and a Nikon D850 (47mp) and both are diffraction limited at F8-F11. I use them primarily for focus stacking at around F4.0. And I am hoping to use the D850 for videos of dragonfly behavior this summer.
Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that it has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --Percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
Why should anyone debate someone who doesn't know the subject? -- AZPaul3
If you are going to argue that evolution is false because it resembles your own beliefs then perhaps you should rethink your argument. - - Taq
I am weary of driving from the bright city, way out into the rural darkness to capture the northern lights. Too many times I've been completely disappointed. But with clear skies and a potential G4 rating last night, I thought, okay, let's try again.
Jackpot . . . (click to enlarge)
Such variety!
When I got home, I didn't see any northern lights, but I tried taking a photo of the sky above my garage. Yep, still some aurora residue.
According to the aurora dashboard, below, it appears the rating got very close to a G5.
(Sorry, only one of five images are showing, the portrait photo, hmmm. I am guessing it has something to do with width limit? I've tried HTML Embed, BBCode (Forums), and Markdown (Reddit). Maybe it is Imgur: The magic of the Internet problem? Percy, if you could please do your magic and link the photos, please).
Here in NW WI the lights have been brilliant all week. On Monday night we could clearly see them through the windshield while driving down the hiway, so we pulled over in a place with little ambient light to look. Last night they were amazing again. Lots of reds and pinks. Monday
Thursday
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up, why would you have to lie?
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