The Sun has been fairly active recently, and we have seen the aurora more often than usual, even at Solar maximum. This is from Edinburgh again; the featured image is pretty heavily processed!
I’ll repeat the featured image here:
Here is what the original looks like:
It’s a 4 second exposure, using my zoom lens at its widest (18mm focal length), f/3.5. The colours show, whereas with the naked eye it was only just possible to see the streams of light. Things are tricky in the city!
Here’s a somewhat less processed image:
The constellation of Cassiopeia is still visible, whereas in the heavily processed image it almost vanishes amongst the fainter stars which are made much brighter!
The aurora was visible to the south as well; here’s the view looking south west towards the “summer triangle” of stars:
Same exposure etc., and the faint hazy green areas are the aurora; it was even less impressive with the naked eye. With a bit of processing the streams of aurora show up better.
We could get a few more of these before the Sun heads rapidly towards solar minimum!