On Thursday, October 10, Elyse and I went up to Washington County in order to photograph the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, which were visible at our latitude due to a geomagnetic storm. We had a good time, photographing from High Rock, as well as the intersection of Route 64 and 418 in Ringgold. None of this was new territory to us, as we had been to these locations plenty of times, and if you’ve followed the website over the years, you will be quite familiar with these locations, as I photographed High Rock in 2015, and photographed at that intersection in 2020. Elyse brought her phone, and I brought the works, taking not only my phone, but also my tripod, my DSLR, and even a drone.
Driving up from our house in Montgomery Village, it was a very dark ride through Frederick and out to High Rock. We questioned whether or not we would see anything, because we certainly didn’t see anything all the way up. Everything looked perfectly normal. Arriving at High Rock, I still couldn’t see anything, but we saw a small crowd gathered up on the rock to see the lights. So I went up there, I set up my tripod, and I started photographing with my DSLR. This is what I got:
Total blackness. I checked all of my settings, tried again, and I still got blackness. The lady next to me was quite helpful, telling me what settings she was using to get her shots that were coming out nicely. I set all of my settings just like hers, and tried again. More blackness. I was starting to wonder whether I was having equipment problems tonight. Then Elyse had a suggestion: did you take your lens cap off? I reached over to check, and wouldn’t you know it… the lens cap was firmly in place. That would certainly cause the results that I was getting. After taking the lens cap off, I got noticeably better results:
I was having a very frustrating time shooting the aurorae. The first problem was that I couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Just looking out at the sky without any additional equipment, the night sky looked the same as it always did. So for that, I was more or less shooting blind. I would aim at a section of sky, run an exposure, see what I got, and then evaluate. And then the result would be blurry. I admit that night-sky photography is something that I’ve never really done before, and it might be fun to try some time when it’s not a special event, i.e. I should practice photographing stars on a random night after doing some research on how to do it. Going in completely cold, I was not having a good time with this. I knew what I wanted the shots to look like, and whenever there’s a disconnect like that, it always starts to be a drag on my morale when I don’t get it. Everything kind of builds. When the initial shots are bad, I get frustrated, and then my mood starts going down. That starts affecting my photography, which results in even more crappy shots. It was also somewhat frustrating because Elyse could see the northern lights unaided, and was able to tell me where there was purple and pink and green, while I couldn’t see them. Maybe it’s because Elyse has blue eyes, and I have hazel, which makes her more sensitive to light? I don’t know. All I know is that I couldn’t see it.
I did somewhat better when I shot using my phone:
These shots were mildly better in some ways, and worse in others. On one hand, I could see the aurorae, and I was more successful in getting things focused. However, since the phone was handheld, try as I might, likely owing to the uneven surface beneath me, I could not hold my phone still enough to get sharp shots, as they all showed some shake. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose. I wonder how much better I would have done if I had used the monopod that I own but never remember to take out with me. Who knows.
So I considered High Rock to be a bust. Yeah, I now knew what I was looking for, but the results were not good. Leaving High Rock, we went down the mountain and into Waynesboro, and then down to the intersection of 64 and 418 in Ringgold to try again. I feel like I did better there, in part because I was on level ground, and in part because I wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of other people. Take a look:
I rate these as “decent”. The first one, I considered good enough to run on the front of the website, so I suppose that’s something. I still couldn’t manage to hold the phone as still as I wanted, so despite my best efforts, there’s still some shake, but it’s still an improvement over what I got at High Rock.
So I guess if I want to do this sort of photography again, I know what I need to practice on. I have no problem going out into some very dark areas at night, setting up the tripod, and pointing it skyward. I mean, I’m pretty sure that I already own all of the equipment that I would need, I have a license for Photoshop, and there are guides out there on how to do it, so I should be able to do something. Time will tell, I suppose. And getting into astrophotography wouldn’t be the worst thing that I could do…