Chase Logs 2007

Kicking off the 2007 Season: Aurora Outbreak
March 24, 2007
1:00am-3:00am
2 Miles West of Grand Forks, ND

Welcome to the first entry of the newly improved Chase Logs 2007!! Severe weather season is in full swing across much of the nation, but in Grand Forks, a different spectacle flooded the sky last night. . .

Tonight's aurora chase was totally spur of the moment. Earlier on Friday I was informed that a solar storm was possible this weekend, but after three months of false alarms and quiet skies, I didn't pay much attention to the alert. I spent the evening in the basement of Smith Hall washing laundry and working on homework, occasionally glancing at the KP Index and activity map. The first quarter moon sank slowly towards the western horizon. By 12:30am I was ready to head to bed, packed up my laptop, and went up to my room. Just before heading to the shower I booted the laptop one more time to check on the weather conditions for the morning. When the aurora map on my homepage loaded I was shocked to see a KP level of 4 and an activity level 10 aurora in progress.

Only in a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals, I grabbed my DSLR and a tripod and ran out to the Smith dike to look for the aurora. Sure enough, a hazy green banner lay across the northern sky, barely visible through the city lights. I jumped in the car (that I had just brought up to Grand Forks) and cruised down University Avenue, across I-29, and to the all too familiar dirt road that extends past the end of University. The road was amazingly clean (for being late March), but my foot sank into an inch of mud as I stepped out of the car. Undeterred, I hastily set up the tripod and camera. After some test shots, I settled on an aperture of f/3.5, a film speed of ISO 160, and a shutter speed of 50 seconds. The sinking moon, only 10-15 degrees above the NW horizon, provided an excellent backdrop for the northern lights. Recent snow melt had covered the fields with water, reflecting the green hue of the lights like a lake.

After about 30 minutes of taking photos, I finally noticed that I was only wearing summer clothes and the outside temperature was 30 degrees. Thankfully there was no wind. The aurora banner remained basically unchanged from 2:00-2:20am, so I took the opportunity to take some self-portraits with the aurora. I then tried taking some close-up photos of the banner, but after a few photos I realized that my camera lens was fogging up. This made for some interesting, but blurry shots. I was able to just wipe the condensation off the lens with my shirt. The moon morphed into a red ball of flame as it disappeared over the horizon shortly after 2:30am. I ran out of my room so fast that I didn't bring my zoom lens, otherwise I could have gotten a few awesome moon shots. The moon is visible on the first and second photos in the second row as a bright red disk at the bottom left of the photos.

By 2:40am I was getting very cold and tired. Despite a strengthening aurora I called it a night, jumped in the car, and drove back to the dorm. As I began developing the RAW photos at 3:30am, I noticed a "digital thumbprint" on the middle of most of the photos. It looked like ripples expanding from the center of the photo and was due to a sensor problem (nothing was on the lens). It took most of the day today to edit the photos in Photoshop to get rid of this issue. I don't know what caused this problem but will look into it.

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