My 3.5-minute 6K music video records the great all-sky aurora show of August 11, 2024. I shot from the 70 Mile Butte trailhead at Grasslands National Park near Val Marie, Saskatchewan. Grasslands is a Dark Sky Preserve.
The aurora was underway in the twilight (as per the opening panorama) and covered the sky with colourful curtains. A wave of red rolled in from the east as a substorm hit after midnight. The red was visible to the unaided eye, unusual to be sure. Note the other colours such as magenta, orange and yellow that appear at times.
The night was also the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower and a few still images I included at the start of the video show a few Perseids I caught by chance in the time-lapse frames. The aurora washed out most of the meteors! But look closely and you’ll see a few appear briefly throughout the video.
This was a magical night, with a Kp6- to 7-level aurora widely seen into the U.S., the best since the Kp8 show of May 10, 2024.
TECHNICAL:
The majority of the video is made of 5 time-lapse sequences, totalling 2060 frames:
The first four (looking east, south and north) were with the Nikon Z6III camera and Laowa/Venus Optics 10mm ultra-wide rectilinear lens (with a 130° field of view), wide open at f/2.8. The first clip looking east with more rapid motion was with 8-second exposures at ISO 1600. With the aurora brighter, I switched to a more rapid cadence for the other clips, using 2-second exposures but at a higher ISO of 6400.
The last clip looking up at the zenith was with the Canon R5 and Laowa/Venus Optics 15mm lens wide open at f/2, and 1-second exposures at ISO 3200, and processed in LRTimelapse to remove the effects of some flickering and exposure shifts.
The final still image is a 360° panorama from 12 segments shot with the Laowa 15mm lens and Canon R5 in portrait orientation and stitched with PTGui.
I processed the time-lapse frames with Adobe Camera Raw, and assembled them (after exporting them out to JPGs) into full-resolution movies using TimeLapseDeFlicker. In TLDF I applied a 1- or 2-frame blending to smooth the motion and rendered the movies at 10 fps, except the final zenith clip which was rendered at 24 fps, but slowed in editing by 50%. Movie clips and stills edited as a 6K video in Final Cut Pro. I retained the 3:2 aspect ratio and 6K frame size of the original time-lapse frames.
Music is “Flight of the Ravens” by Edgar Hopp, licensed from Epidemic Sound.
29 сен 2024
