Surprising Colour

On Friday evening, we did what many did and hit the night roads to look for the aurora. I had a spot picked out on a farm on the edge of town. I thought to pull in just off the road and get a pretty good northern and eastern view. I thought to just just off the road and not really onto private property, but it would be enough.

But two cars beat me to it, and they pulled right in, well onto the property. So, I kept driving and ended up a very rural road about 8km from home. Our town is in the bottom left of the map ↓ and there's a thumbnail of the aurora where we stopped to take pictures. You can see that it's all green out thataway: a mixture of forest and fields and few humans. We couldn't see green in the dark, of course, so it was a slow trip down that dark, rural road, but thankfully not a long one.

As we drove along, there were trees and bushes on the left side of the road, which obscured the northern view,  but I eventually found a cleared spot. Of course, there was nothing but cloud to see. Oh well.

However, there seemed to be something happening in the eastern sky. There were streaks going overhead and a wee bit of shimmering, but it was very dull and colourless.

However, when Sue pulled out her phone, behold! there was colour.

I didn't know this then, but camera sensors see a greater colour range than we do, especially at night. It does seem odd because humans see a much larger range of light than cameras see: light but not colour. Go figure.

Eventually, I also pulled out my camera, but the show was over by then, or at least the shimmering part was over. However, the sensor still picked up a ton of colour. I tried to at least keep the light level true to what we were seeing, for it was pretty dark.

I took a photo looking along the dark road ↓ that we would have to drive along to get out of the farm field territory.

This always happens on Blogger. On my high res photos in my workflow,
I can see the road more clearly.

I'm now having a second thought, and I'll show you one of my first photos ↓ SOOC, no editing. Crazy exposure on a dark night, eh? The previous two photos show the reality better, but the next one was my first attempt.

It was a weird experience to see that light to come out of a dark and what seemed to our eyes, a colourless sky.

That's ↑ the story, but I have a few more photos to show. 

I used my headlamp to light up the sign.

That ↑ was a phone shot by me. This ↓ is a phone shot by Sue of me later setting up my big camera on the tripod.

Sue did a composite of some of her photos.

That colour was very unexpected. I thought that we were wasting our time until Sue took the first photo with her phone.