AURORA 29th & 30th OCTOBER 2003

The sun was unusually active for this point in the solar cycle. Two large flares (X17 & X11) Produced aurorae over wide areas of the globe from 29th to 31st October

29th October 29mm 200 Ektachrome 15sec f2.8

Digitised by taking a picture of the projected slide with a digital camera

CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW FOR SHORT ANIMATIONS (WARNING 700kB)

These animations were recorded on 30th October 2003 and are 50x actual speed

The animations were created using a Nikon Coolpix 2100 digital snapshot camera. A series of images were taken at 10 second intervals and combined to make short animated gifs. As the maximum exposure of this camera is only 2 seconds, the images were severely under exposed (a 20 second exposure would have been required for correct exposure) The original images appeared almost completely black. Applying a large histogram stretch however recovered rather noisy images with limited dynamic range. These were adequate for the animation. The still images were produced by stacking four frames from a time when less movement was visible. This gave images with less noise and greater dynamic range

CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW FOR SHORT VIDEOS (2Mb)

50x actual speed

This video was made using the 1004x camera in normal video mode, recording onto video tape. This was digitised at 5fps and the frames stacked 50 at a time and histogram stretched to produce the 50x actual speed video clips.