October 30th Aurora from Bedford, NH

On the evening of October 30th, 2003, I was setting up my telescopes to do some hydrogen alpha imaging from the backyard observatory when I noticed that the sky was getting lighter, not darker.  A step back and a glance to the north showed why, Sunspot 486 had ejected a CME 24 hours earlier and now it was colliding with the Earth's atmosphere.  I grabbed the kids, an Olympus camera, my coolpix digital camera, two rolls of film, a tripod and SR cable and went as fast as I could up to Joppa Hill Farm, here are the pictures...

The aurora started around 6:40 and these are a few of the photos when the storm was most intense.  The photo to the right is the "coronal impact point".  This is the point where the suns supercharged particles which have been caught in the Earth's magnetosphere, interact with the Earth's atmosphere.  That's actually what causes an aurora, when incoming charged particles excite gasses in our atmosphere, the gas that is being excited and how excited it becomes, dictates the colors that we see in an aurora.

The photo on the right, is the only one of the digital photos that came out, the rest were way too thin (not enough color or density).  All of the film photographs were taken with an olympus OM-1 and 27mm lens stopped to f/4 on supra 400 film.  The digital photo was run by channel 7 all day on the 30th, I was star for the day!

Interested in ordering prints of any of these photos?  If so, click here.  You'll need to register with shutterfly in order to have them send them to you, but I can attest, they do fabulous prints which are true to the original images.