The great aurora of May 2024

Backblip because excitement and tired

I didn't know a solar geomagnetic storm was imminent, and I was all for having a lazy night until a colleague at work mentioned it late on Friday evening.  It was only after a cycling friend separately forwarded a photo taken from somewhere around Leadburn, an hour later, that I thought to look out of the window.

Oooh!  Immediately I could see the trails of the aurora, strongly south and a bit east, and emanating from almost directly overhead.  After a few minutes outside to let my eyes adjust I could see pale, creamy grey-green wispy streaks all over the place, so I rushed to get my tripod and big camera set up while simultaneously phoning Mum and Dad to tell them to look out of the window and also wrapping up a late evening chat with BikerBabe.

Because I was so captivated and intent on gathering as many photons as possible, I shot only long exposures, from 15 to 30 seconds, with my  35mm lens wide open.  It's a good little lens: it's sharp and gathers quite a lot of light.  I kept the sensor gain as low as possible to minimise noise, although this all meant that the photographs would show a more blurry, ethereal impression of the aurora than would a faster timed shot.  Fortunately it was very warm and I stood outside, snapping away until about half-past midnight.

This was one of my best images and I've not Photoshopped it much: only a slight curves adjustment to darken the darkest parts of the night sky and brighten up the lighter parts, per my usual astrophotography routine.  Of course, it's also wholly unrepresentative of the view with the naked eye – especially in the light polluted wilds of Midlothian a few miles south of Edinburgh – but it's what it would look like if our eyes were capable of storing light at all frequencies at once!

After not a lot of great sleep I cycled into town to the bike recycling place in the vain hope that they might have a set of old 1990s cranks that would help reduce the width of my pedal stance on Mirabel: my knees are just too sensitive to the current setup; alas after half an hour's raking through the parts bins I didn't find anything suitable and cycled home via the supermarket where I got a couple of things from the 70%-off rack.

After washing Fidra and getting her sparklingly clean again I was seized with the idea of washing the front of the garage which was very not sparklingly clean, so I was out with the sponge and bucket of sugar soap for an hour.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately because I've wanted to do it for years) it took half the paint off in the process, so now I really do have to paint it.

Mum and Dad came round for tea-and-aurora-slide-show, and by about ten o'clock we were looking out of the window hoping that the skies would stay clear enough.  Dad's aurora alert app suggested the intensity was only about half of the big storm, but strong enough to warrant going out in the dark to try our luck.  Very many other people had the same idea!  But even if the sky was auroraing strongly it was just too cloudy, so we retraced our steps just before midnight.