It wasn’t raining, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and god put on one of her light-shows. To have all three things in place at the same time, in mid Wales, unheard of.
This was taken last night (10/10/24) at around 23:00 hours (GMT +1) with a DJI mini4. It was also my maiden flight at night, even if it was straight up the straight down - poco a poco. Wonder if there will be another chance tonight?
As you found out there was no show last night (Friday 12th). But you may not be aware of the free app ‘AuroraWatch UK’ for a smart phone. It gives regular activity levels with alerts if there is anything interesting going on (I suggest you mute your phone at night unless you want to be woken up!) There is a web site with lots of details here: https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/
This site (where the plot can be animated to show the last 24 hours) is also worth a look: Aurora - 30 Minute Forecast | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
If you animate it now (it’s 9:24 am Saturday) you can see briefly just how strong Thursdays aurora was. But do it now!!
Cheers,
Peter
I notice the file name has ‘astrostacked’ contained in it - did you take several photos and then stack them to enhance? I’d be interested to hear about the workflow you used. TIA!
Thanks Astropetev for this info., really useful sites to keep an eye on. Unfortunately missed the window of opportunity to see the strength of Thursday’s show which was truly amazing.
Hi Howard,
It would be far too grandiose to describe my method as a workflow, it’s more a case of … what happens if I try this.
The short answer to your question is yes, it was a stack of 5 separate images, jpgs as it happened but not to enhance the colours, only to reduce noise. Digital cameras have an exceptional ability to record a wide spectrum of colours that we struggle to see for ourself. In low light situations the sensors of most cameras produce a lot of noise but still manage to record something. Since the noise is random this can be greatly reduced with software and the final image can then be tweaked as necessary.
I sent the drone up to 120m to get the best view possible of the light show and just hovered for about 25mins. Initially I had the exposure value set at 0 but as I couldn’t see anything at all on the controller I upped this to +1. According to the metadata for the still photos this equated to 3/10sec shutter speed at ISO 4,040. I captured some video clips and a load of still images (using the timed shot function at 3 secs) in both raw and jpg format.
A selection of still images were opened in Affinity Photo2. There was not a vast difference between the raw and jpgs so for ease I used the jpgs but will probably revisit the raw images when time permits. When I first looked at the stills and was pleasantly surprised (and relieved) I had anything at all especially as this was the first time I’d used the drone at night let alone for night photography. To reduce the noise I tried stacking images using both the ‘stack’ and ‘astrostack’ options. Each gave very acceptable results with the astrostack option just winning by a nose. I didn’t mess with the final image but I’m sure in the hands of someone more capable they’d be able to get more out of it.
Bit of a ramble but hope this answers your question.
That’s very helpful, Andy. I’ve used stacking software for Astro photographs from the ground before and I’m thinking I need to be better prepared for the next solar display. Those exposure parameters look good for the drone and for my Osmo Pocket 3, and give a basis for exploring what works with ambient light around here (edge of Oxford). My Pixel 7 Pro does a lot of in-phone processing and one output was a 1 second video from 4 minutes of exposures and stacking. I’ve slowed it down to 10 seconds here,
When you increased the exposure to +1 to see the aurora on your controller, did you reduce it to 0.0 when taking the pictures?
Many thanks again for taking the time to respond.
Hi Howard,
No I didn’t revert back, I kept the ev at +1 and I’m glad I did as ev 0 was a bit too noisy though stacking a few images would have reduced this a bit. Despite what many say, sticking to a low ISO isn’t always the way to go if light level are low.
Incidentally, I managed to get a short video clip by putting a ruck of stills into Davinci Resolve. Knowing what I can get away with now I’ll probably stick to sending the drone up for as long as the battery holds up and just take as many still photos as possible. That way I’ll end up with plenty of photos I can mess with plus turn them into a video clip. It’s just time lapse in its simplest form with frame exposure adjusted as required.
You have some great shots on your instagram account, thanks for pointing me to your page.
Thanks, Andy - do send me a link to the clip if you think it worth sharing.
