As soon as darkness fell the auroral arc was visible. First showing up on photographs and soon after to the naked eye. As it got darker the colours began to be visible to the eye: the green of the arc and higher up the reds of the beams and curtains. Not the intense colours seen in photographs but bright enough. A few scattered clouds hung around but did not affect the visibility too much. The crescent Moon set well before midnight. By 22:00 hrs. activity was increasing and around 22:30 hrs. the display was overhead and moving in to the southern sky. Motion was clearly visible by eye. Thereafter activity waned a bit but as the video recordings show the aurora remained active until sunrise.
The Steyning magnetometer (2-axis, north-south and east-west) recorded huge swings in the geomagnetic field of up to 700 nTesla. By 'sonifying' the field measurements it was possible to add a synchronised soundtrack to the video recordings with a satisfying correlation between the two!
The RMS Meteor camera, operated as part of the Global Meteor Network (GMN) recorded the activity at an azimuth towards the north-west compared to the colour 'Aurora/NLC' camera which is angled slightly east of north. One of the products of the GMN processing is a 'fieldsum' chart which shows the variation in light-levels seen by the camera over the course of the night. For this night it shows that the aurora was at its brightest before midnight with a bit of a lull around midnight before increasing again in the post-dawn hours.
Visual & DSLR images from dusk until 23.30hrs: 50°51'36" N 0°20'48" W
Timelapse & magnetometer and visual/DSLR images post-midnight: 50°53'17" N 0°19'56" W
Timelapse from north-facing IP camera
'Sonified' timelapse with synchronised sound from magnetometer
created with Astronify
Black & White Timelapse from RMS Meteor Camera
Note: The spike shortly before midnight and the small spikes after are due to local lights not the aurora.
Copyright Nick Quinn, 2024 July 9
