All Sky View of the Aurora from CNSC, with thanks to Alan Dyer

On Monday night, we had a spectacular aurora here in Churchill. Our astronomer and fearless leader, Alan Dyer, was out with his camera during the whole display. This was at 2 in the morning in extremely cold temperatures! What a guy. If you follow this link, it will take you directly to Spaceweather.com to the aurora gallery. I go there all the time, to check out aurora photos from around the world.

Earlier that evening, much of the sky was overcast, but you could see auroras even behind the clouds. I did some photographing, mostly to practice with the camera, the tripod, my new gloves, my red headlamp, and my handwarming muff. My biggest challenge is still focusing the camera and keeping it is focus. As our astronomer from last year used to say, "Infinity changes". I always liked that idea. Many people think you can just set the camera on infinity, but that just doesn't work, and the extreme cold will change things too.

Here are the photos I shared on Facebook yesterday. Considering the conditions, I was pretty pleased. Brian took at least half of these before I went out. The aurora faded away, and I headed to bed. An hour later, there was a knock on my door. "Brian and Linda, the lights are dancing!" And they were. This time, I did not bring the camera. So, thank you Alan, for the wonderful photos on Spaceweather.