I got an Aurora Alert from the UK at about 7 PM, but wasn't able to get out of town until closer to 10 PM to see if the camera could pick any up from Nebraska (a relatively rare event). It seems that I was just in time to see the end of the show and the closing credits roll. It isn't a remarkable image, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do appreciate documenting aurora from this far south.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/6279780167/in/photostream/lightbox/ While I was at it, I experimented with the shortest non-guided exposure that I could use to get round star images of the Pleiades cluster (AKA "Seven Sisters"). I stopped the Pentax-A 50mm f1.7 that I was using down to f2.5 and made this image at 4 sec (ISO 800). This is a simple center crop 1028x768 out of the full frame (in-camera jpeg). I did have to clone out one spot of hot pixels. I also rotated the image so I could compare it to this star map: http://www.obliquity.com/skyeye/misc/pleiades.gif http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/6280298876/in/photostream/lightbox/ Visually caught a nice long meteor overhead. Wish I'd captured that on camera! Very relaxing 90 minutes before heading back to town and a semi-responsible bed time. Darren Addy Kearney, Nebraska -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
