ASTRO DOG'S CELESTIAL ADVENTURE: LAST NIGHT'S / THIS MORNINGS AMAZING AURORA DISPLAY!
With great excitement, we waited to see what the evening might bring and whether we would see the arrival of the anticipated X4.5 solar flare. At the first sign of impact, we gave everyone the heads up, grabbed our gear and headed out the door.
Unfortunately, when we stepped outside there was a lot of cloud in the sky. However to our delight, once we had arrived at our destination and set up our cameras, there was a beautiful bright green arc just visible through the gaps in the clouds, stretching across the Northern horizon. The aurora began to intensify and despite the clouds we could make out a subtle glow across the horizon to the naked eye. After a short period of fairly strong activity, the aurora began to settle down. At this point we noticed and turned our attention towards a gorgeous 22° Lunar halo which was surrounding the Moon and the ringed planet Saturn.
After a few hours of waiting to see if the aurora would kick back in, we decided to head home as it wouldn't be long before twilight set in. But at the last minute we changed our minds and went to a new location. When we arrived, we quickly set our cameras up and boom! The aurora was incredible! It exploded all across the Northern sky. There were vivid, visible-to-the-eye rays of light stretching up past the Plough and even subtle colours were discernible to the naked eye, despite the bright Moon still lingering in our sky.
As the morning went on, the Moon descended lower and lower in the sky, looking beautiful as it set towards the South-south-west. The Moon shone with an amazing fiery orange hue before finally disappearing from view below the horizon.
The aurora continued to dance throughout the morning, in fact the aurora was still dancing while the orange and blue morning twilight was setting in.
Eventually the morning twilight drowned out the aurora, so we packed up and began the journey home. On the route home we saw a beautiful baby fox, too.
All in all, it was a magical evening with an incredibly magical Northern Lights display.
We captured many images over the night and will look through them all when we have some time to. For now, we would like to share with you all one of the images we captured later in the morning. We hope you like it!