Aurora - 3.3.2024

[ONIKKINEN]

Some videos of the light show we just had. Taken with a Google Pixel 7 in astrophotography time lapse mode from southern Finland at around 60 degrees of latitude.

First one is towards Orion, 4 minutes worth.

 

Next one towards the Pleiades, also 4 minutes.

 

Then the best one, 5x 4 minute timelapse stitched together. Towards north this time, where most of the show was going on.

  

 

Not sure the videos will look nice in forum format, might need to click to full screen and let them be scaled to your display - let me know if there is a better way to upload. Couldn't figure out a (free and easy) way to stitch the videos together for the last one without a loss in resolution so this is just a google photo autogenerated "video highlight" which reduced the resolution but i think it still looks ok.

Gotta say i am very impressed with the Pixel 7 and the automatic astrophotography mode. Really there is no trial and error involved, just stabilize the phone somehow and click go and it will do its thing for 4 minutes and spit out a stacked image and a video of the frames that went into it. The stacked images dont really work for Aurora in this case, since these ones moved really fast so no point in stacking all that movement to a single image.

[FenlandPaul]

Definitely a “proper” aurora show and just mind boggling how phones have come on show that kind of goodness. Nice one - hope you got to enjoy the show too!

[Elp]

Great captures. I got an old P4 just for scope control use (and a decent back up phone if I need one) and was surprised I could take night sky images handheld with nightsight (not full ap mode, the phone senses when it's not stationary).

Edited March 4 by Elp

[ONIKKINEN]

9 hours ago, FenlandPaul said:

Definitely a “proper” aurora show and just mind boggling how phones have come on show that kind of goodness. Nice one - hope you got to enjoy the show too!

Sure did, all i had to do was click the shutter button every 5 minutes - no need to worry about dark adaptation since the sky brightness jumped from the usual magnitude 20.9 to 18.4 so it really wasn't dark at all. To be fair it wasn't quite this spectacular in person, the phone is really doing some heavy lifting here. Its funny how it goes, when the Aurora is directly overhead and in every direction like this time, its actually more difficult to see the striking patterns and "curtains" of light. That's why they were only easily seen towards the northern horizon where the edge of the light show brought contrast against the darker background sky.

6 hours ago, Elp said:

Great captures. I got an old P4 just for scope control use (and a decent back up phone if I need one) and was surprised I could take night sky images handheld with nightsight (not full ap mode, the phone senses when it's not stationary).

Same thing with the Pixel 7, you cant manually tell the camera to go into astrophotography mode. The phone needs to be stationary for a good while, maybe as long as 10 seconds. I think they did this to encourage people finding a way to mount the camera properly instead of trying to do handheld or braced handheld imaging to let the software do its thing properly. My setup is cobbled together from broken and unused parts i had lying around. An EQM35 steel tripod with the polar alignment peg sawed off and an AZ-5 on top of that. Skywatcher L-bracket on the AZ-5 and a broken Celestron eyepiece smartphone holder ziptied to the L-bracket 😁. Which is why everything is in portrait mode, it cant rotate fully to landscape because of the ziptie preventing full roll control. But it works, and cost me nothing so i will call it functional kit.