AURORA 20th NOVEMBER 2003

The active regions on the sun which produced aurorae over wide areas of the globe from 29th to 31st October rotated back into view and produced a further widespread aurora display on 20th November

CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW FOR SHORT VIDEOS (1.5Mb)

These videos were recorded on 20th November 2003 and are 50x actual speed

The videos 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 mpegs. 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 video. 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