Contains:  Northern lights

A brief outbreak of Aurora Borealis during dusk (2024-05-11/12)

A brief outbreak of Aurora Borealis during dusk (2024-05-11/12)

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

For my second attempt of capturing a time-lapse aurora movie, I hiked to a nearby lake last night. Unfortunately, the sky was still a little bit too bright to capture the only significant outbreak of aurora activity between 23:00 - 00:00 CEST. Nevertheless, a few bright red rays were still visible with the naked eye. In order to produce smoother time-lapse movies, I reduced the exposure time from 8 s to 4 s while increasing the ISO from 3200 to 6400. The additional noise can be quite effectively suppressed in Lightroom, beside that noise seem to be less visible in movies than still images.

4 s seems to be the sweet spot to produce time-lapse aurora movies. If it is too fast, you can reduce the playbackspeed to 0.5x without getting a too choppy movie. Larger playback speeds between 1.25x to 1.5x also are quite reasonable. A 1440p version of the time-lapse movie is available here

As shown in the short time-lapse in Revision B, I also encountered a lake monster during the peak of aurora activity, which took a short look at my camera setup and moved along. Like all good monster movies not much is visible due to the 4 s exposure time. 

11/12.05.2024, 23:27 - 00:25 CEST

Equipment:
+ Canon EOS 600D
+ Canon EF 8-15mm F/4 L Fisheye USM @ 12 mm
+ Remote shutter release and timer Triton MQTC01
+ Vanguard tripod Veo 2 264CB

Camera settings:
+ ISO  6400
+ 533  x 4 s

Processing:Adobe Lightroom:
+ color balancing & saturation corrections, histogram and curves transformations, noise reduction, tiff export

LRTimeLapse:
+ creation of time-lapse movies (30 fps, 1080p, High Quality)

Location: Rosensee, Germany

Comments

Revisions

  • Final
    A brief outbreak of Aurora Borealis during dusk (2024-05-11/12), MrCrazyPhysicist
    Original
  • A brief outbreak of Aurora Borealis during dusk (2024-05-11/12), MrCrazyPhysicist
    B

B

Title: The lake monster movie

Uploaded: ...

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A brief outbreak of Aurora Borealis during dusk (2024-05-11/12), MrCrazyPhysicist