Contains:  Extremely wide field
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Camped on a frozen lake looking North, Ian Dixon

Camped on a frozen lake looking North

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Camped on a frozen lake looking North, Ian Dixon

Camped on a frozen lake looking North

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

"Looking North across the Ice to Black Island"

Last Saturday night (March 6), I waited until just after sundown and put on my snowshoes with the intent of hauling my DSLR and old vixen tripod out onto the ice on the big lake (Lake Winnipeg near Wanipigow). Usually the transparency is quite good at this time of the year, but on this day we had some unusually warm weather with 9*C during the day. The lake remains super frozen though with at least a metre of ice thickness. The horsetail clouds and windy conditions made for some poor seeing - and no aurora!

No worries, despite the huge amount of moisture in the air and the strong southerly wind, I broke through the deep soft snow (4 feet deep or deeper in drifts) near the shore with all my gear on my backpack. Once I reached the lake ice, the snow changed and became hardpack. The native folks that have lived here for generations have literally dozens of words to describe snow conditions and phenotypes, and I can see why. I made my way out about a third of a km, and did a rough polar alignment with my small Ioptron mount, and dialed in the timer on bulb mode.

I took this northward looking image to try to give an impression of what I could see. Lots of interesting noises from the ice - cracking and booming with the temp at +2*C or so.

Things to note: Polaris is almost centred in the sky. Vega is down low, near the horizon. The milky way is to the left with an upside down Cassiopeia. Its rare for those in my part of the world to see such a clear northerly milky way as the aurora typically erase its existence quite effectively.

Old Canon 60D with IR cut mod

10mm Rokinon lens

Manual focus

90 second exposure at 1600 ISO

Thanks for looking, as always.

Comments