On our way back from a nice romantic time by the river, my wife and I spotted an ENORMOUS looking moon overhead. Near Zonta park I snapped this shot as the moon peeked over the treetops. Have you ever wondered why the moon looks so large while near the horizon and smaller when high in the sky? Click here.

This weekend was a working weekend, but it was one I’d been anticipating for a while. Friday and Saturday were spent working as a graphics, animation, and CG guy for a college football game on NBC in Fargo. What made it special was that my wife came with. She got to spend time with the crew and/or their wives while we worked, and then we got to have a mini-vacation afterwards. The most important part was the scenic route we took back from Fargo, dipping into the southeastern part of the state and working our way back.

We were in the vicinity of Crystal Springs, having just visited the oasis in the dark, when we spotted some white spikes on the northern horizon. Naturally we pulled to the side of the gravel road for a few quick snapshots. Above is what we saw!

Part of the challenge in photographing auroras is playing around with settings. I typically don’t mess with any aperture settings, but might toy with the ISO and shutter speed a bit. Something like this typically takes 20-30 seconds of open shutter at 100 ISO.

These faint flickers didn’t last long. After only a few minutes of dancing around, the aurora borealis settled into a hazy ring around the north. At that point we hopped back into the truck and took off for home. Once settled in, I did hop in the truck and zoom out to my favorite vantage point, but there were still no flare ups, only that glow.

There I was, out at the Game and Fish OWLS site east of Bismarck, when I looked up. What a neat formation of clouds! I thought I’d share them with you.

This post reminds me of the Thursday Night Sunset run of posts I did a while back. Then I ran into the difficulty of catching every Thursday night sunset…or perhaps a particular Thursday sky would be quite lame. Now I just go for quality, not regularity.

Sure…it’s already Wednesday. What can I say, I’ve been busy! This is how the moon looked when I pulled into Taco Bell to grab some late night munchies. The clouds were trying to obscure it but that wasn’t likely to happen.

This is actually a composite of two photos I took at the time. It’s impossible to get the detail of the moon if I leave the iris open enough to get the light scattering through the clouds; doing that makes the moon a giant gold circle. So I took one with the iris open, one with it closed a bit more. I then composited the two together to show you what Monday night’s moon looked like.

I don’t mind Photoshopping a picture here and there; nearly every exposure can benefit from a little bit of color correction. So-called photography “purists” turn their noses up at digital photography and the use of Photoshop altogether… yet those same people will “push” an exposure in the darkroom to get similar results. I don’t see the difference. If I was able to shove the information into the camera, there’s no integrity in making sure I get the exposure and color the way I want it.

Compositing, however, is something about which I believe all photographers should be up front and honest. In this case it hardly matters, but I still insist anyway. That way if I ever pull off an amazing photo and there’s any question as to its authenticity, I don’t have a history of trying to pass off Photoshopped work as authentic. This ain’t Reuters! Oh darn…I hope that didn’t put an end to doing contract work for ’em. In any case, if someone puts out doctored photos, they deserve to be called on it. That’s especially true of a news service, not just some guy spouting opinions on a site that only gets a couple thousand hits a day!

When one’s wife unexpectedly says, “Let’s hop in the truck and just drive,” one had better jump on the opportunity. I did tonight, and one of the meandering routes we took had us playing around on the soggy county roads south of Mandan.

At one point the clouds broke, the stars poked out, and I made one stop to point the camera back at Bismarck. The city lights bounce off the clouds so nicely, and can be seen from many miles away. By playing with the white balance on my camera I was able to get a pretty unusual color bounce.

My friend Jerry mentioned today that he had seen the International Space Station pass overhead last night. That piqued my curiosity, so I decided to look up on NASA’s site to see if it was passing overhead again tonight. It was, at 10:20 pm and 11:56 pm.

The sky was simply too bright to get a decent picture at 10:20pm, so we decided to meet up again at 11:30ish. This time it came in at a different angle, passing right over the top of the Capitol building. I had the shutter set to stay open for 30 seconds, so you get to see the streak. Obviously this station travels very quickly; it passed quite a long ways in those 30 seconds. That allowed us a window of 2-5 minutes to see it if we’d been able to see both horizons, but really only a matter of seconds from the wooded Capitol grounds.

I did “push” the exposure a little bit to help get the streak to show through better. The lights of the Capitol were blinding and they shut off right after the ISS slipped out of sight at midnight.

This was the ominous display of the POES map last night around midnight:

Looks like we’re headed for a meltdown, doesn’t it? So I bolted up north of town with a good friend of mine, and saw…well, nothing. The sky had a light glow to it, but that’s it. Nothing to report.

That red streak is a plane drifting along the horizon…when the shutter is open for 30 seconds you tend to get neat little artifacts like that.

Oh well, better luck next time! Not to worry, though; we’re heading into another stretch of meteor activity such as the Arietid, June Taurid, and zeta Perseid meteor showers.

I was about to post about the fabulous time my wife and I had at the HoDo this week, but then my phone rang with the news that our upper atmosphere was flaring up. I grabbed the camera and bolted north of town, and that’s where I snapped this shot, among many others.

The auroras were dancing like crazy, albeit briefly. They were so active that the full moon lighting the sky didn’t even matter! Normally with a full moon I wouldn’t even bother to go hunting for Northern Lights, but tonight the moon had competition. I got plenty of photos but so far this one is my favorite. It’s way too late (early?) to sort through them all.

So if you want to watch for the Northern Lights, you might want to do so in the next few nights. For some aurora watching resources, click on the Northern Lights link on the right hand panel. Enjoy!

While up at Double-Ditch last night I was able to nab this moon photo. It wasn’t actually dark, but the moon is so bright a guy has to clamp the aperture down to get a decent picture. It was actually taken within a minute or so of the picture below!

We still have a few nice “secret spots” around the Bis-Man area that are perfect for astronomy, astrophotography, or just plain hangin’ out under the sky. This happens to be one of them, and on Monday it didn’t disappoint.