POLAR LIGHTS
- Thread starter snowleo
- Start date
I enjoy trying to identify the stars I'm seeing even though I've seen the deep southern sky maybe twice in my life. At the very top, super bright, Alpha Centauri, below that Beta, and then the southern cross (with the "head" pointing down and to the right, and that corner an orange star. (At least I hope so!)
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Aussie shooter
https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
Definitely the southern cross (upside down so to speak). Not sure about the names of the other two. I have always just known them as the pointers as they are used in conjunction with the cross to find south.
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Yeah, that would be Alpha and Beta Centauri. They're actually quite prominent, especially Alpha Centauri.
Alpha Centauri is actually a double star (won't be visible without a telescope), one of the two (A) is 50% brighter than our sun, the other (B) half as bright, so the pair put out twice as much power as the sun. The pair is the nearest visible (to the naked eye) star to the Sun. (There is another star, a red dwarf that can only be seen with a telescope, called Proxima Centauri, it actually orbits Alpha Centauri A and B making it in fact a triple star. It's actually noticeably distant from the other two as seen from Earth, and it happens to be nearer to us than A and B are, so it holds the crown for nearest star to the sun, period.
Beta Centauri is also a triple star. They are a lot further away (~90 times as far) and intrinsically brighter by far than Alpha Centauri. (All three are spectral class B with a color temperature of over 20,000K.) Between the three of them, they belt out 66,000 times as much power as our sun, mostly in the ultraviolet.
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Aussie shooter
https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
We had anorher display of Aurora the other night. An M-class fare a few days prior sent a coronal mass ejection straight towards earth. The weather was hit and miss with a lot of cloud forecast but we managed to get a bit of clear skies right at the peak time of activity. Still. When it is 2.30am and you are heading out to shoot for a client the next morning you do wonder how sensible it is to be doing what you are doing 
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I'm glad you went out and did it anyway, it looks great. Hope the shoot the following day went just as well!We had anorher display of Aurora the other night. An M-class fare a few days prior sent a coronal mass ejection straight towards earth. The weather was hit and miss with a lot of cloud forecast but we managed to get a bit of clear skies right at the peak time of activity. Still. When it is 2.30am and you are heading out to shoot for a client the next morning you do wonder how sensible it is to be doing what you are doing
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Aussie shooter
https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
Had a special show last week with a G2 just touching on a G3 solar storm hitting right as we had miraculously clear skies. It was a stunning show
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Aussie shooter
https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
On the morning of the 24th April (Aussie time) something special happened. We had the most impressive Auroral display in Tasmania for at least a decade. I never thought something like this would be seen outside of the polar regions. I was wrong. Anyone in the north catch it?
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Aussie shooter
https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
Only going to get better over the next few years
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Aussie shooter
https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
Had a nice show last night. It wasn't a particularly strong solar storm during our hours of darkness but the aurora really fired up.
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