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Tag: Star Trails

GEOSTAT Alert Fail.

Brendan
Iron Pot #1 by Brendan Davey
Iron Pot #1, a photo by Brendan Davey on Flickr.

Words you don’t really want to hear when you waiting for an Aurora.

“IPS GEOSTAT ALERT NUMBER 140: GEOMAGNETIC STORM FAILED TO EVENTUATE ISSUED AT 0402 UT ON 11 Jul 2012 BY IPS RADIO AND SPACE SERVICES FROM THE AUSTRALIAN SPACE FORECAST CENTRE”

IPS Space weather is great site for getting alerts and warnings about, well, space weather. 🙂 I must admit trying to get a clear cold night with no moon and the right conditions for a geomagnetic storm to occur all at the same time is quite difficult. Particularly when you need the storm to be big enough to see the aurora from a location 42 Degrees South.

Starie Starry Night

Brendan

I’ve been playing about with long exposures recently, although I haven’t had the time to go out and take some more “formal” shots, I took this one locally recently. It’s a 17 min exposure, f5.6. Unfortunately with the cold weather (winter) the sky was a little hazy, which washed the stars out a little.

As past of my experiments into long exposures it became quite obvious that I needed a few new toys, an external timer and shutter release, which I got cheaply on eBay, and an easy method for calculating the correct exposure length. Solution: I made my own handheld exposure “computer”. Details on this can be found in the Long Exposure Tutorial.