eekuasepinniW

Thank you. The shooting conditions were rough with 30-40 mph wind gusts at times.

What type of camera do you have?

Pretty impressive how skillfully it managed to start fizzling as soon as the sun set.

Best photo I could manage from tonight with frozen hands and 300mph wind.

I know for a fact that the Nikon D610 is very clean up to 6400, and useable much higher... and that's a "prosumer" model, not by any means top-of-theline. It's just outrageous the amount of information that modern digital sensors are able to glean from what are essentially stray photons. I mostly use my old D5000 on nights like tonight, when "good enough" quality will suffice, and I'll be leaving it by itself at times. It's definitely noisier, but one can generally compensate for mediocre cameras with a fast enough lens. 

Wow, that's really great.  I've kinda fallen out of photography so I'm not too up to date with the extent of the improvements.

Being able to take shorter exposures would really come in handy tonight.  My hands are like ice and I have to hold the shutter down because I don't have a cable release thingy.

Yeah, but would it matter that the bz sucks right now?

It'll matter in about an hour.  The satellite that measures the data is way out there.

ok very bright

Clearing out a bit.  Very noticeable glow out there now and it's much higher in the sky-- promising.

Btw, took some pics, not worth uploading. What are you ruining for ISO on those pics? Everything I took tonight was horrifically grainy.

What you can get away with for ISO settings totally depends on your camera.  If you've got noise, it's set too high.

My camera is over a decade old and has horrible noise above ISO 200.  New cameras supposedly maintain decent quality and go up to 1600 or even 3200.

Secret tip:  Leave your camera outside.  Excessive grain/noise issues can be caused by heat on your cameras sensor, so keeping it cold makes a big difference.  You can really see this in action if you look at dendrites webcam in the winter vs summer.

Eek,

 

Do you have the link for that image that monitors the Bz/Bt index numbers?

 

I used it last time, but can't find it now.

http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/ace-mag-swepam-6-hour.gif

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind

A few more from that night.

In the Lakes Region? That's awesome.

I picked this up as a hobby from 2001-2003... you could see the lights about 1-2 times per month... the sun was just completely unhinged those years.  

I hope you've made money off of these.

Not much money to be made from small, grainy images.  Would be nice though!

Time for Eek to post his 2003 corona.

I cry every time I think about losing the larger originals of these.

Does the human eye see this. The pics out of Finland are surreal

Reds and violets are visible from the darkest locations in the strongest storms.  Cameras will pick reds up easily, but the human eye won't.  Most photos are long exposed and exaggerated in that sense,  but the one you posted is probably very close to accurate.  

I've only seen reds and violets twice.

After years of trying to catch the odd spike to Kp 7, I'm not sure what I expected hours and hours of Kp 8 to look like, but it sure wasn't this. lol

Like you said, we're waiting for a substorm.  

Even with the 6 hours of Kp 9 in 2003, the actual show lasted maybe an hour before reverting to the bland green arc along the horizon.

Are Bz and Kp related? For example will a positive Bz hurt the Kp or are the 2 indicies unrelated? 

Bz is measured a million miles out in space at the L1 point, and Kp is derived from how disturbed a global network of ground level magnetometers are.

A lower Bz will allow a greater disruption of the earths magnetic field and the Kp will rise as a result.

Still, it's good enough to go back to a Kp of 8 apparently.

Things holding steady in meh territory.

Took a photo of the west through a hole in the clouds, about 45 degrees above the horizon, and it's violet.  There is likely a greenish arc lower on the northern horizon hidden behind the squalls.

Damn squalls are 10 miles away and I'm getting wind blown snow from them.

What is Bz? Why is it important?

It's basically the aurora light switch.  If the value is north (positive) nobody sees anything except santa.

"When Bz is south, that is, opposite Earth's magnetic field, the two fields link up," explains Christopher Russell, a Professor of Geophysics and Space Physics at UCLA. "You can then follow a field line from Earth directly into the solar wind" -- or from the solar wind to Earth. South-pointing Bz's open a door through which energy from the solar wind can reach Earth's atmosphere! Southward Bz's often herald widespread auroras, triggered by solar wind gusts or coronal mass ejections that are able to inject energy into our planet's magnetosphere. From: http://spaceweather.com/glossary/imf.html

That period of higher density and lower Bz from an hour ago should be here by now.

Too bad these troll squalls won't leave me alone.

God damn Bz trying to pull its usual well timed flip.  Maybe it'll level out.

Density is going back up.  Everything looks primed for a big show well down into the mid atlantic.  

Kp "down" to 7 at 21z.

That not-so-perfect period a few hours ago led to the slight kp drop.

Bt is climbing and Bz is dropping. Looks really good.  Wouldn't be surprised if it went back to 8, just need the density to stop dropping.

I don't know, it looked pretty real to me. I have seen this happen before in the past. You have to remember the tree pulls apart, it isn't like it just pushes through. I can't say it 100%, but once I saw it in person it is hard not to believe it. A hole couldn't have been drilled, it was closed back on it. Like I said I can't say forsure but I have seen this before with other tornadoes.

I know trees... the bark is smooth and flawless and shows no evidence of cracking or being bent... the odds of it splitting or pulling apart and then magically sealing back up around the hose with no obvious stress fractures are pretty much zero. The hose would prevent the crack from being able to close back up so tightly.

lol... that hose wouldn't have gone through the tree unless fired out of the large hadron collider. I've seen more than enough ropes, vines and other objects embedded in trees to know what it looks like. The bark is unblemished and the hose is pinched tight... it's probably been there for many years.

The rope I tied to a small maple tree to hang a bird feeder way back in middle school is now fully engulfed and up probably 30 feet.

Weird. On my computer the colors don't match, even when I zoom in real close. EF5 in the legend is a heavy, brick red, and there is no such color on the map.

Correct and incorrect... the brick red in the key isn't even sorta close to being the same color shown in the map. You can use the color identifier in any image editor to verify the difference. It's because they made the colors on the map somewhat transparent so you can see the streets underneath, which is why they're not as dark.

I just knew there was something really fishy about that picture. This makes much more sense.