{"id":632,"date":"2016-01-20T23:21:18","date_gmt":"2016-01-20T23:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benfreke.com\/?p=632"},"modified":"2021-11-02T20:09:19","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T20:09:19","slug":"aurora-borealis-lancaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/2016\/01\/20\/aurora-borealis-lancaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora Borealis, Lancaster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On January 20th 2016, the Northern Lights could be seen from the North West. The Earth flew in to\u00a0a remnants of a CME previously in the week, causing minor geomagnetic activity in the upper atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Conveniently, the skies were also clear – the perfect opportunity to capture the Aurora was approaching. I knew it was coming, as Lancaster University’s Aurora Watch<\/a> wad detecting around 130 nT of geomagnetic activity (nT is\u00a0nanoteslas, the unit of measure for some geomagnetic monitoring stations).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aurora
30 Second f\/1.8 ISO 100 was too bright<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Using a 35mm, f\/1.8 lens and a Nikon D7100, I headed out to Jubilee Tower, in Lancaster<\/a>. As reported by Light Pollution Map<\/a>, there was only a small amount of light pollution here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem that I was going to incur was the moon. Wednesday was moving into the middle phases of the Lunar Cycle, meaning there was a near full moon. This would severely dimish the Aurora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None the less, I attempted to take some shots. Firstly, a 30-second exposure with 100 ISO was too bright, due to the moon. Bringing the exposure down to 20 seconds solved this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aurora
20 Second at f\/1.8 and ISO 100 was pefect.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I took a total of 15 photos, of which I used four auto-aligned and auto-blended on Photoshop successfuly produced the end result.

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I edited the levels on the end product. I also removed the grass from the blended image (as due to the alignment the grass became somewhat blury) and readded it from a clean image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The full image can be downloaded here<\/a>, along with the raw image here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On January 20th 2016, the Northern Lights could be seen from the North West. The Earth flew in to\u00a0a remnants of a CME previously in the week, causing minor geomagnetic activity in the upper atmosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1856,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions\/1856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.benfreke.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}