This Month's Astrophotography - Aurora Borealis and Comet A3

A couple exciting astronomical events this month with a massive flare up of the Aurora Borealis lighting up the skies even down in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also the pass by of Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas C/2023 A3 making its once every 80,000-year visit for us to see it. We snapped off a few photos from our mobile phones and then setup our big telescope to see what all we could capture...

Photographing the Aurora Borealis

The solar flares earlier this month were so strong that we were able to see colorful lights even as far south as where I'm at in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Getting a good snapshot of a low light object or event is generally easy these days with the standard mobile phone using some night mode / low light functionality that's built-in these days. I tend to turn on a 5 second countdown capture so I can prop my phone on a table or ledge, push the capture button, then stand back and let the thing take a stable picture than me thinking I can hold my camera "perfectly still" for the 2-4 second low light exposures. For the Aurora Borealis, this is what I got:

Photographing Comets

Using the same technique this past week propping the phone on a windowsill with Comet A3 passing by, this is what we ended up with:

It looks like the comet was captured in the late afternoon light, but actually it was completely dark out (about 45-minutes after sunset) and the lightness on the screen is from light pollution (city street lights and the "glow" of house lights).

And for the capture of the Aurora, we purposely stood where our house blocked as much of the street and city lights so we were really just looking up and over our roof letting into our camera just the dark parts of the sky, where after 2-3 seconds of exposure let in the colors not the white light of homes and street lights.

And neither of these events were easily seen with the naked eye. We could see a "bit" of fuzz of the comet and a bit of hue from the Aurora, but it really took the better low light sensors of the camera to capture the lights.

Bringing Out the Big Telescope

We did get motivated to bring out our big telescope to see what we could capture. Right after the comet passing, we were able to capture the Ring Nebula on our telescope (about an 8 second exposure of deep sky night):

But then the whole night sky started to light up, and this big boy showed up a half hour later:

Once the moon brightens up the night sky, our telescope pretty much becomes useless in trying to photograph deep sky galaxies and nebula. Also, it's still very warm out in the early evenings, so our photos get distorted by heat waves coming off the streets, hills, etc...

Wrap-up

SO, we will lug out the big telescope during some super cold and crisp winter evening, on a night where there's no moon light, and see what all we can find in the deep night skies.

But exciting here in October to be able to capture the lights of the Auroa Borealis and a Comet making a visit.