Aurora, northern lights were seen at HJRO in Lincoln park by Faac astronomers

We were setting up and adjusting the telescopes tonight and I had my telescope outside to do some observing.

I looked up and saw a red glow. It looked like a large sky glow event one would see from a steel mill. It was in the north west and also extended toward the east. I had heard that there was an alert about a cme blast that could cause auroras and immediately hollered for other astronomers to look up and view the aurora that we could see.

It was bright and I quickly grabbed my canon t1i and set it up on the tripod to take a few photos. Some of the photos were not as focused on the stars as they could have been, but I was in a hurry.

I shot them using iso 3200 and ten second exposures.

The bright exposures makes it almost look like it's daylight outside, but the glow is from the northern lights.

We didn't see any green as far as I can tell from our location, but may have missed some of the initial green displays. A few of us were calling and leaving messages to other Faac members who lived nearby to tell them to head out and take a look to see if they could see the aurora display.

When I called Rick Arzadon, his wife told me that he was outside looking at the red sky and I told her it was the northern lights.

Within five to ten minutes, the glow greatly decreased and could only be detected with long exposures as it diminished.

We had a fun time viewing through the greatly improved c14 as we did a star alignment of the secondary mirror and had many other fine tune adjustments happen with the software.

We had a great night. I left at about 2:30am.

We even had a local visitor who owns a 6 inch dob and often travels to Monroe to view the sky in a darker location. He was a graduate from LP high school and told me he never looked through the telescope in the old days. I gave him a faac card and invited him out to the club meeting. We showed him m42 through the c14 and Jupiter through the 49 year old ten inch Dobsonian, Big Bertha.

Very bright at first almost from horizon to horizon, in light polluted skies.



Eastern view above western view below




Starts to fade below. . .






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