A fine aurora 11-12 oct 2010

[Tony Rickwood]

My first decent view of the aurora for quite a while. What started out as a quiet arc later developed into a very respectable display! Photos taken about a mile north of Ullapool, northern Scotland using Canon EOS 300d, 28mm manual lens @ f/2.8 1600 ISO Exposures 15 and 30 secs. It does get better than this- but not often!

[astroimpulse]

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwOW!

Stunning. Well captured

[Moonshane]

this literally took my breath away. beautiful.

is there a season for Aurora? it's on my things to see before I die list (quite near the top).

[skybadger]

Tony - I see in your sig a 'fluxgate magnetometer'. Is it the Noble design and how successful do you find it. I built one aeons ago and it wanders all over the place, despite lots of care with the coils.

regards

Mike

[Tony Rickwood]

Tony - I see in your sig a 'fluxgate magnetometer'. Is it the Noble design and how successful do you find it. I built one aeons ago and it wanders all over the place, despite lots of care with the coils.

regards

Mike

The magnetometer is a later version. I seem to recall the first kit where you had to wind and test the coils and it was a bit ambitious for me at the time. Then I learned of the new version based around Speake and Co's FGM-3 sensor which was a lot easier to construct and could be either outputted to a meter or interfaced with a computer. I did a paper years ago for the BAA journal which explained my setup and had the schematic that I used. Here is a link 1998JBAA..108..147R Page 147 Unfortunately, Richard Noble died some years ago, but as far as I'm aware, the sensor should still be available. It is a bit twitchy in a non temperature stable environment, but as an early warning for magnetic activity, it works very well indeed.