markmccaughrean

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

I mean, look at this stuff overhead, & just with the phone 🤷‍♂️🤪

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

And could this curtain be any more crisp & colourful? 😻

Again, just with the iPhone, so subject to all the usual crap, but still …

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@cgbassa Excellent – am on my way to the beach to see what we can see, but the hope is that it should get brighter later, if I've understood the predicted CME front arrival time properly.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@cgbassa Hmm, I should have gone out earlier after all, but there’s a lot of family momentum here & I won’t be able to get them out of the house more than once 🤷‍♂️

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@cgbassa I’ll take my DSLR & mobile to the beach – predictions seem to have the main CME front arriving in a couple of hours. I doubt we’ve seen the last of this yet 🙂

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@blackwolf12333 @cgbassa From the space weather folk at the University of Reading, I think: I can’t find it again now.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@blackwolf12333 @cgbassa Check out @mathewjowens on Twitter: he’s saying sometime between now & a couple of hours later.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@ExoHugh Very good – I'm going to go to the beach in a bit & see what I can see here. A bit further north, but also to the west, so not quite as dark yet.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@gang https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/aurorawatch-uk-aurora-alerts/id946141347?l=en-GB

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@gang A quick search reveals this – might be what you're looking for. https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/northern-light-aurora-forecast/id1092949787?l=en-GB

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@gang And there are quite a few others, if you search the Apple App store. Presumably also for Android.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@happydisciple Oh yes; some superb views from the car park at the Lentevreugd outside Wassenaar 🙂👍

markmccaughrean, 18 days ago

I took the picture handheld with my Nikon D7000 DSLR & a 200mm zoom lens.

I put a regular polariser filter on the front of the lens. The I took a pair of shonky IMAX 3D glasses, which have polarised plastic filters in them, & rotated the glasses to cross the polarisers & dim the Sun down enough to avoid saturation.

The exposure time then 1/6400sec at f/10, ISO100, so perfectly good for handheld.

There's some thin cloud & the IMAX plastic lenses are rubbish, so the image isn't super-sharp.

markmccaughrean, 18 days ago

And for the photography geeks, this MacGyver cross-polariser set-up makes the Sun look very blue, so when the DSLR RAW image is demosaiced, things aren't great.

So I switched the image to b/w mode in LightRoom to combine the channels differently, then colourised back to this yellow tint.

Some denoising then helped with the demosaicing issues.

markmccaughrean, 18 days ago

To be clear, the forecast severe geomagnetic storm (the first G4 warning since 2005!) doesn't only mean that the aurorae will be seen far south in Europe, but also in North America.

And similarly far from the South Pole as well.

So you should keep an eye on space weather / aurora watch websites & apps for tonight (in Europe & NA), starting perhaps with these:

https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov

markmccaughrean, 18 days ago

Here's the G4 storm alert which could lead to some spectacular auroral activity tonight much further from the poles than usual, plus a webpage from Aurora Watch UK with links to social media accounts & mobile apps that'll warn you if it's all about to go off.

Make sure you can quickly get to a dark location with a clear horizon – aurorae are very fickle at best & come & go in minutes, although this could be a doozy.

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g4-watch-effect-may-11
https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/alerts/

markmccaughrean, 18 days ago

@BettinaKoza Now that's what I call planning ahead 🙂

I'm sure I have some kicking around somewhere, probably from the 2015 eclipse I saw from Iceland, but have no idea where they might be at this point.

markmccaughrean, 18 days ago

@Julianoe @skynebula Very good points – when I wrote "our generation", I was searching for something that encompassed a wider range of time, but failed.

And I agree that our children will be harsh judges – that's already clear & they will suffer the brunt of the decline we have put in place.

But when I was talking about historians, I was thinking a thousand or even ten thousand years hence, when perhaps after the long dark of collapse & planetary recovery, civilisation may emerge again.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@mikewaghorne I get your point, but as I've replied a few times already, I was thinking 1,000-10,000 years from now, when perhaps the climate has reset & humans have started climbing towards civilisation again.

We will have left enough detritus around for people to wonder who we were & quite how we screwed up so badly.

And they'll discover that we were to blame for the long dark ages their ancestors endured.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@mikewaghorne Me neither & perhaps thankfully so, if only because we'll all be collectively looked back upon as idiots at best, genocidal evil-doers at worst.

markmccaughrean, 17 days ago

@ZillaMon Some humans will survive, albeit not many & certainly not in a good state. Humans survived the last ice age, after all.

My thought was that in 1,000 or perhaps even 10,000 years, if the climate resets itself without our CO2 excesses, then they may have the stability needed to build a new civilisation.

And they will doubtless see the remains of ours & wonder at quite how idiotic / careless we must have been to let it all slip away.