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Spectacular aurora in GEORGIA
Wow! Between 7 and 8 p.m. EST tonight (0000-0100 UT Oct. 31) we had a very
fine aurora borealis which I viewed just north of Athens, near Danielsville (34 N) at a dark-sky site where I regularly observe. As I was driving to the site I wondered what was reflecting on my windshield to make a dull red vertical streak. I parked, got out of the car, and the streak was in the sky! It went from the horizon through Perseus to about 40 or 50 degrees altitude. Unfortunately it faded as I was setting up the camera to photograph it. But a succession of other auroral activity followed, ranging from northeast to north-northwest, with both red and green glows, changing on a timescale of minutes (or tens of seconds), and moving around in such a way that they could not possibly be clouds. (That, and with binoculars, I was able to see stars through them.) Despite the crescent moon, we had mag. 5.5 skies, with the Milky Way plainly visible. The aurora achieved as much as 5 to 10 times the brightness of the Milky Way. I took a lot of photographs which will be developed next week. In general, horizontal parts of the aurora were greenish, and vertical streamers were reddish, but that was not the universal pattern. By 8 p.m. the show was almost over. A shapeless glow, low in the north, persisted. It resembled the vague aurora we saw late the previous night. In fact it looked like light pollution except that there is no town in that direction. In the past I had only ever seen two auroras: a bright but compact one seen while flying over Newfoundland and a very vague aurora over Georgia that looked like light pollution but photographed as brilliant red. (And a vague glow in the north last night.) This was far more than I ever expected to see from the Deep South! Clear skies, Michael Covington -- www.covingtoninnovations.com Author, Astrophotography for the Amateur and (new) How to Use a Computerized Telescope |
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