By extraordinary good fortune, on the night of 10/11 May 2024,
we were coming to the end of a week's stay in the lovely village
of Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales. Also I had remembered
to take my wide-angle (16mm) aurora lens, "just in case". By now it was getting very much towards the end of the
aurora season
with astronomical twilight just starting to never end (i.e. the
sky was never fully dark).
That evening, with my Apps going
mental over the possibility of something big about to happen, I
started to get things ready and departed shortly after 22:00 BST
to find a location up on the road that leads roughly north
of the village onto open moorland. Apart from the occasional
passing car this proved to be a good location and much darker
than anywhere near our home in southern Oxfordshire!
I
stayed until about 01:30, so about 3 hours photographing this
incredible aurora. The equipment I used was a Canon R5 with the
RF 16mm f2.8 lens, mounted on a tripod. I mostly used 10sec
exposures @ f2.8 with the ISO depending on the brightness of the
aurora.
The images shown here come from the photos
I took to generate stills and some timelapses (in animated
gif format), taken with intervals between 15 sec and 60 sec.
Right at the end of my session, I stopped the last timelapse
sequence and had some fun simply pointing the camera in various
directions to see what was happening at that time. In some ways,
this was the most enjoyable period of my time up there on the
moor.
All
processing was done with Photoshop apart from the initial noise
reduction for which I used DxO PureRaw 3.
A truly
memorable experience. This was a G5 Geomagnetic Storm which is
the strongest category and the best since 2003! |
