Perseids and Aurora, 11-12 August


 
Photos taken with Canon EOS Rebel T7, kit 18*55mm lens, ISO 1600, F4.8, 15 second exposure,

 Went out last night  at about 23:00 MDT, Hoping to watch the Perseid meteor shower. On my way out, Anne reminded me that the Aurora Borealis was supposed to be visible from our location tonight. I set up a lawn chair looking NNE towards where Perseus should be. The Aurora was covering that part of the sky all the way up to the bottom of Cassiopeia. It extended from the NNW to the East.Visually, it looked like a large grey/white cloud, and could easily be mistaken for one. In fact, I'm sure I have in the past. Through my night vision scope there was occasional structure ( vertical striations ) visible. I tried to take some pictures with my phone camera, but it isn't well suited for that type of imaging.

Cell Phone Photo looking East. You can just pick out a hint of the red.

The Aurora created quite a bit of skyglow. We also have quite a bit of smoke from wildfires. The smoke exacerbated the light dome over town south of us. Normally it is limited to less than 10 degrees in altitude. Due to reflection in the smoke, it was up to at least 30 degrees and twice as wide as usual. Between the two situations, I estimated my NELM (Naked Eye Limiting Magnitude) as 3.5-4. This meant that I was only able to see brighter meteors. In the little over two hours that I was out there, I saw one non-Perseid meteor and about half a dozen Perseids. They all were bright and left trails that persisted for up to several seconds.

With the reduced hours of dark and smoke this summer, there haven't been a lot of good opportunities to get my telescope out. Instead, I have occasionally been just going outside and working on learning more constellations and star names. Not a lot of headway so far, but some.

 Clear Skies!

 

 

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