Juliancolton

Well, that deescalated quickly. The Ovation model still looks impressive despite the putrid IMF, so maybe it's not entirely a lost cause?

Well the solar wind is certainly primed. Things are heating up a couple hours later than in recent storming events, so maybe the Bz component won't give us as much grief this evening.

Big

Wow, that's freaking sweet. What I wouldn't give to experience something like that. I need to move north.

Noctilucents clouds > aurora? https://twitter.com/NWSSeattle/status/608232353488502785

Looks quite good to me. I would no doubt be out with my camera if not for the dense overcast.

That's why the surprise events are the best... the clouds don't have time to conspire against us.

The magnetic field is definitely still disturbed, and with solar wind velocities way high and a -Bz component, it wouldn't take much to trigger some more storming I don't think. Like eyewall said, though, it's a shot in the dark most of the time.

Thanks guys. Yep, right in my backyard near Millbrook around 2am. There was definitely color in the sky most of the night, but the strongest pillars/curtains were maybe like 15 minutes. Lots of folks in the Midwest say it was the best display in recent memory, and I believe it, but I just wish I was more prepared for it. The best auroras never happen when you track a CME for three days and set up your equipment hours in advance, but instead when you get a text at 12:45 am saying you need to get out whether your camera is charged or not...

Nice show last night... best pillar structures I've seen. I think something knocked the focus ring on my camera after I left, as most of my shots are all too far out of focus to be usable. Impressive colors though.

Cool VIIRS nighttime image showing the band of aurora over southern Canada this morning. A wider and less pronounced view: and IR from the same time, for reference:

Yup. f/2.4 and ISO 1250 for 15 seconds, unedited jpeg. I'd be happy to give you some suggestions if you decide to start looking into new gear, though in today's day any basic dslr and lens kit would probably produce some decent results.

Here's the "best" shot of the night, out of something like 400. Kind of a deeper shade of green than I'm used to... more in-line with what someone would use for St. Paddy's Day. Festive!

Well at least we weren't let down after eagerly anticipating a major event for 72 hours or something (that's happened enough this cycle. I had almost forgotten about this CME until the indices started going bonkers this morning.

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.

Hard drive crash? Either way, that looks truly awesome.

Yeah? Wow, I didn't realize that. I only had a passing interest back then, so I don't think I spent more than a few moments looking upward for that one. It's pretty incredible to read the accounts of zenithal coronas over Chicago and NYC in 1859, 1882, etc., knowing how difficult it is to even see diffuse greens on the horizon. I got lazy and hooked my camera up to an intervalometer for some warmup time indoors. Will check again in a bit.

Very faint green curtain structure on my LCD. 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

My camera sensor is seeing increasingly funky colors on the northern horizon. Going to stay on the lookout for a substorm. Sure is cold and blustery though... quite conducive to aurora chasing.

Bz straddling neutral now. Congrats Iqaluit.

Ugh... it literally never fails. Almost sickening if it started getting meh right as dark falls after looking so good all day. At least the other parameters still look decent.

Wing Kp model back up and predicting Kp 9 in four hours. Good good.

The storming has sustained itself better than I expected it would. Kp 7 into this evening would be more than acceptable.

The Wing Kp data has been missing for several hours per http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/text/wing-kp.txt. Not sure what's up with that.