I'm a big fan of your videos and chase work Skip. Great to see an interesting new video from you. I hope you are having a good and safe storm season so far 🙂👍
Unreal!!! I knew I should’ve driven out to check this out, my gut told me it would be legit this time, but how crazy are solar weather has been lately, sure there will be plenty of opportunities to see stuff like this I just can’t believe there’s that much Green in ILLINOIS… wow!!!
I've always wondered Skip, are you using longer exposure or stacking images to get the brighter color or is that recording what you would see with your naked eye? Given all the activity our sun has had lately we have had some excellent aurora's here in NH but its very dim and difuse with the naked eye. Thank you very much for taking the time to collect this and share it with us!
If you're in a truly dark sky, the aurora can look quite vivid, and keep in mind you always have to shoot it with long exposures as the human eye is way more sensitive than the camera. But in this case, the camera is greatly enhancing the color and contrast because just outside of Springfield, IL there's still quite a bit of light pollution which otherwise would kill the view. I'm shooting 30 second exposures, f/3.5 and ISO 800 on a Canon 60D with EF-S 10-22mm in case you want all the gory details.
Wow, both because the display is stunning but also because it happened in central IL. I wasn’t able to see anything near Collinsville. Not sure if it was light pollution or it just wasn’t visible here.
Any light pollution kills it. You have to be under a black sky out in the country. And then it was only really kicking just after 11 pm, the peak of the show lasting 10 to 15 minutes I think. And then it was faint the rest of the night.
Amazing images. Love the way each photo merges over and into the next one in your timelapse. Also, neat shooting star at 0:54 (or iridium flash maybe?).
Very cool. We got to watch it here in Alaska though it is staying light out so late now that aurora chasing is getting tricky. A rare night where it was probably better to be farther south.
Are you going to have a video on what happened on March 24th or a more detailed video about the cold core tornadoes earlier this year? I enjoy your work but I prefer more long-form content due to the the way I use stuff like RU-vid
Hey skip. You gonna do a video on chaser mistakes that have exploded in 2023? Lots of bad decisions being made left and right. I love your chaser safety analysis videos
Maybe! I'm slated to do a safety presentation early next year and so will likely dive into these cases for that. I have a whole bunch of other projects I want to work on in the meantime with the limited time though so those will hopefully come first.
looks awesome, but with naked eye it's nowhere near impressive. When I saw it for the first time, I was like "wait - that's it?" 🤣 You really need that exposure from camera.
A long exposure really makes it pop like any astrophotography, but a black, black sky can really make it vibrant to the naked eye too. The kind of sky where detail in the Milky Way is plainly visible, then the reds and greens and purples really do sparkle and shimmer. Any kind of light pollution quickly obliterates it, such that if you can't see the Milky Way, the aurora just looks like a faint band of cloud to the north. I saw it a couple times in a sky that dark where the curtains were going overhead and it really is awesome.
I was lucky enough to see an excellent aurora from suburbia however it was only due to the massive 1989 event and back then all the streetlights in my area used to turn off after midnight. It was amazing.
