markmccaughrean,
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

You'll definitely see much better pictures, but this is mine 🌞🤷‍♂️🙂

The massive sunspot group AR3664, one of the largest for years, has been flaring & chucking out massive amounts of particles towards us for days 💥😬✌️

Which is why there's a severe geomagnetic storm warning for tonight & a good chance of seeing aurorae way down south in Europe 🥳🤞

🖖
🇳🇱
📷

markmccaughrean,
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

I took the picture handheld with my Nikon D7000 DSLR & a 200mm zoom lens.

I put a regular polariser filter on the front of the lens. The I took a pair of shonky IMAX 3D glasses, which have polarised plastic filters in them, & rotated the glasses to cross the polarisers & dim the Sun down enough to avoid saturation.

The exposure time then 1/6400sec at f/10, ISO100, so perfectly good for handheld.

There's some thin cloud & the IMAX plastic lenses are rubbish, so the image isn't super-sharp.

markmccaughrean,
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

And for the photography geeks, this MacGyver cross-polariser set-up makes the Sun look very blue, so when the DSLR RAW image is demosaiced, things aren't great.

So I switched the image to b/w mode in LightRoom to combine the channels differently, then colourised back to this yellow tint.

Some denoising then helped with the demosaicing issues.

markmccaughrean,
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

To be clear, the forecast severe geomagnetic storm (the first G4 warning since 2005!) doesn't only mean that the aurorae will be seen far south in Europe, but also in North America.

And similarly far from the South Pole as well.

So you should keep an eye on space weather / aurora watch websites & apps for tonight (in Europe & NA), starting perhaps with these:

https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov

markmccaughrean,
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

Here's the G4 storm alert which could lead to some spectacular auroral activity tonight much further from the poles than usual, plus a webpage from Aurora Watch UK with links to social media accounts & mobile apps that'll warn you if it's all about to go off.

Make sure you can quickly get to a dark location with a clear horizon – aurorae are very fickle at best & come & go in minutes, although this could be a doozy.

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g4-watch-effect-may-11
https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/alerts/

BettinaKoza,
@BettinaKoza@astrodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean
I looked at the sunspots using the 1999 eclipse shades.😎👍=😃

markmccaughrean,
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

@BettinaKoza Now that's what I call planning ahead 🙂

I'm sure I have some kicking around somewhere, probably from the 2015 eclipse I saw from Iceland, but have no idea where they might be at this point.

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