I really wasn’t planning on posting any more photos of comet C/2011 L4 (Pan-STARRS), since I figured it was tapped out.
I was wrong.
But first, I want to show you an astonishing photo taken by photographer Shannon Bileski
of Manitoba. She was out doing some shooting when she heard there might
be northern lights popping up. She got in her car, drove to a good spot
near Lake Winnipeg, and starting taking pictures.
Getting good shots of an aurora is hard enough, taking some degree of luck. But what she got was just freaking amazing:
A very lucky shot of a shooting star and the northern lights.
Image credit: Shannon Bileski, used by permission.
Image credit: Shannon Bileski, used by permission.
By coincidence, a bright meteor streaked through the sky as she was
taking the picture above on Mar. 29, 2013. I might even call it a
fireball; it clearly got far brighter even than Jupiter, which you can
see on the left (just off the V shape of the horns of the constellation Taurus). It was no Chelyabinsk meteor—thank goodness!—but it was still pretty intense.
In a shot like this you don’t get the 3D perspective that helps you
figure out distance. Usually in a picture of the sky the objects you see
are all at vastly different distances; clouds might be a few kilometers
up, while the stars, of course, are trillions of kilometers distant.
But as it happens meteors and aurorae both occur at roughly the same
altitude: 100 kilometers.
At that height, the air is dense enough that the pressure from the
incoming chunk of rock compresses it, heating it up so that it can glow.
It’s also at the right density to interact with subatomic particles
blasting in from the Sun. Those particles energize the atoms in the air, causing them to glow. The green color comes from oxygen, while red can come from both oxygen and nitrogen.
What this means is that the meteor and the aurora are pretty much
coincident in space; it’s not just a perspective effect. That’s cool.
But wait! There’s more!
A week or so earlier, on Mar. 20, my friend Babak Tafreshi was out taking night sky shots and caught comet Pan-STARRS with a burst of auroral activity:
Babak Tafreshi caught the comet Pan-STARRS (just visible on the right
over the mountain ridge) and an aurora. Click to dirtysnowballenate.
Image cedit: Babak Tafreshi, used by permission.
Image cedit: Babak Tafreshi, used by permission.
You can see the comet over the mountain range; the aurora became
quite strong just minutes later. He was lucky to get both in the same
shot. A few minutes either way and he would have missed one or the
other. Incidentally, Shannon’s friend Sheila got a cool shot of the comet seen in the aurora. Wow.
Babak also made this lovely time-lapse animation of the images he took showing the comet setting, and then the aurora coming to life:
I’ve seen comets, and I’ve seen meteors (and I’ve seen sunny days I
thought would never end). But I’ve still not seen a good aurora. Babak
was in Tromsø, Norway, where a lot of photographers get amazing shots.
I won’t be able to get there any time soon, so maybe it’ll have to wait
for the next solar activity maximum in 2024 or so. In the meantime, I
really hope I get a chance to see this ethereal beauty someplace closer.
I do love posting incredible pictures and video like these, but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself. Some day.
posted by Pieface @ 8:46 AM
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