Having missed the last aurora completely, I now have the excellent Aurora Watch UK app to alert me to significant geomagnetic activity and a good night was indicated for August 12th, also the best night of the year for the Perseid “shooting stars” and for once the skies were clear. I now also have an app called Nightshift to let me know of cloudless nights in advance.
As I discovered on my trip to Elan Valley last year, trying to take photographs in the Dark Sky zone there (see Animal Wild), although my Nikon P1000 will do just about anything, including extraordinary close-ups of the moon (above), it draws the line at astral photography. In certain circumstances it simply will not allow me to push settings beyond certain limits. I therefore acquired a Canon EOS 2000D for the purpose. I had never tried it out before and it would have been a great success. I had all the settings correct (aperture, ISO, shutter speed) and had reminded myself how the remote control worked except … I forgot to check that manual focus was set to infinity, hence these rather blurry photographs (they look fine on the camera’s screen at least, but not when viewed elsewhere). Infuriating. The Perseids however did not disappoint.
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