Aurora Out My Window

Posted on October 13, 2024 by Maria Langer

I see the aurora for the first time — well, sort of — right from the comfort of my own home.

If you pay attention at all to science-related news, you are probably aware that the sun is near the peak of its 11-year solar activity cycle, with lots of sunspots and coronal mass ejections. This has made aurora a lot more visible than usual, making it possibly for people to see it as far south as Arizona and Texas.

I don’t live that far south. I live in north central Washington state. Opportunities to view the aurora abound at my home — which has a perfectly unobstructed view to the north, right to the horizon — but I’ve spent much of the past two years away from home. Ironically, from June through August, I was traveling at latitudes farther north than where my home is, but I just didn’t see the aurora on any nights I might have. I could blame weather (clouds), ambient lighting (being near a city), or a lack of clear view to the north (from trees or mountains).

But when I got home, I became determined to see the aurora from my home.

The Science of the Aurora

I would be remiss if I did not mention the excellent Space Weather and Aurora Dashboard pages constantly updated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It provides a wealth of information about the aurora, from forecasts and current conditions to basic and detailed information about what causes the aurora.

For example, NOAA’s Aurora Tutorial page starts its explanation of the aurora like this:

The aurora is formed from interactions between the solar wind streaming out from the sun and Earth’s protective magnetic field, or magnetosphere. The aurora is one manifestation of geomagnetic activity or geomagnetic storms. As the solar wind increases in speed and the interplanetary magnetic field embedded in the solar wind turns southward, the geomagnetic activity will increase and the aurora will become brighter, more active, and move further from the poles. Even moderate solar wind creates aurora so there is usually a weak aurora somewhere even when there isn’t a big geomagnetic storm.

There are two types of solar events that create big geomagnetic storms that are associated with bright and active aurora. The first is a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, which can be described as a billion tons of plasma ejected from the sun, traveling at a million miles per hour. When a CME arrives at Earth, it can produce some of the biggest geomagnetic storms and thus, some of the brightest and most active auroras that extend furthest toward the equator. The second solar event that can create moderate sized geomagnetic storms is called a coronal hole. Coronal holes are the source of high speed solar wind streams. When these high speed streams arrive at Earth, they can produce active auroras. But the geomagnetic storms and aurora associated with coronal holes is less active than those from the biggest and fastest CME’s.

Later on that page, it explains what causes the individual colors you might see. This is a great place to start if you want to learn more about how the aurora forms and when viewing is best.

Forecasts < Actual Conditions

My quest to see the aurora started with the forecasts on the Aurora Dashboard page. Each day, NOAA provides a forecast for tonight and tomorrow night. You can see an example in the top two images in the screen capture below. Like any weather forecast, this is a prediction of what might happen based on data and models. In this particular example, the forecast looked good for two nights in a row.

In the early morning hours of October 10, the forecast for that night was a lot more optimistic than reality.

I’ve lost a lot of sleep trying to see the aurora. In this example, the forecast told me it should be visible where I live. But this page also provides a very short term forecast for the next 35 minutes. The image on the left is for the northern hemisphere and it painted a truer picture of the situation. The chances of seeing the aurora where I lived was slim. And, of course, I didn’t see it on the night of October 9-10.

The short term forecast looked a lot better on the night of October 10-11.

But things were different on the night of October 10-11. I knew they were different when my social media feed on Mastodon began filling with aurora photos. I watched the Aurora Dashboard and was rewarded with a very promising short term forecast image. I set up a GoPro pointed mostly at the northern horizon and sky and turned on the night hyperlapse feature. Then I turned off all the lights in my home, including the solar string lights on my deck, and hung out on the deck to watch the sky.

Understand that my home might be 2 miles down a gravel road 10 miles from town, but it has a commanding view of the entire valley, including the brightly lighted cities of Wenatchee and East Wenatchee. This is not a good place for stargazing. No matter how much I tried to get my eyes adjusted to the dark, it simply wasn’t dark. But soon, after a while, I started seeing a reddish glow in the sky. I took a photo with my iPhone 13 Pro — yes, I know it’s time for an update; maybe after Christmas — and was shocked to see auroral streaks of pink lines in the photo.

This was the first photo I took from my deck. It was 7:13 PM, less than an hour after sunset.

For the next few hours, I moved from inside my nice warm (but dark) house to outside on my cool deck. I tried hard to see beyond the faint streaks in the sky, but every time I took a photo, the photo revealed far more than I was seeing. It was out there but my eyes just couldn’t take in enough auroral light to see it very well.

I took this photo a little while later. The predominant colors were a pink and an almost lime green.

Here’s another shot from a while later.

It was rewarding but also frustrating. This was probably the first time in my life when I could photograph something better than I could see it. But I wanted to see it! With my eyes!

The sky started to cloud up a little and my frustration got the better of me. After a while, I gave up.

The Video

This was apparently a mistake. I should have tried again around midnight. How do I know this? Well, remember that GoPro I set up? Here’s what it captured before its battery died:

The Next Aurora Viewing

I’m watching the forecast pages closely. The next time we have a strong forecast, I’ll be ready with multiple cameras — including my Nikon, on a tripod — to capture it. But next time, I’ll set up a lounge chair on the deck, snuggle in a sleeping bag, and watch until I can see it better with my own eyes.

On Saying Yes When You Want to Say No

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Maria Langer

Never turn down an opportunity to hang out with new friends.

Here’s a time-lapse on YouTube of moving the helicopter. I didn’t realize at first that I had blogged about it.

The other day, I was invited to a steak dinner at what I call the Huey Camp: the area where three Huey helicopters are parked for cherry season. I met one of the pilots, Stan, late last season when I brought him and the other pilot a pizza after chatting with him on the radio while we were all drying cherries. Later, he let me fly his helicopter and I returned the favor by helping him load the helicopter onto its trailer while it was attached to my truck.

As I tweeted when I shared this photo on Twitter, I think that helicopter looks pretty good behind my truck.

I ran into him again in Arizona over the winter and was glad to hear he was coming back to Washington for cherry season, camping in his motorhome at the same place. He and another one of the Huey pilots came for my annual pilots’ BBQ a few weeks ago. So when he invited me for a steak dinner with all the Huey pilots and some others in attendance, I said yes.

Thinking of Excuses

Of course, when that afternoon rolled around, I wasn’t feeling like going out. The heat really knocks me out sometimes and I’d spent the afternoon napping after doing too much work in my garden. It was hot outside in the sun and I didn’t think there would be much shade up at his camp. I thought about all the excuses I could use to back out.

It was dark out when I captured this image of a falconer with one of her birds last August.

But then I thought about the previous year’s steak dinner up there. (I apparently didn’t blog about it because a quick search came up empty.) In any case, it was one of those magic evenings when things are just a little bit weird and a little bit wonderful. One of those evenings you remember for a long time, mostly because they’re out of the ordinary. That one involved a frantic trip to a car parts shop with a woman I’d met just an hour before, arriving just before they closed to get a part she needed for her truck. Then repairs on the truck with steaks coming off the grill after 10 PM. It was after that that I learned the woman was a falconer and I got a really neat shot of her with one of her birds.

That night might be just as interesting, I told myself. Or more. You can’t experience new things when you stay home. Get the hell out.

At Huey Camp

So I showered and dressed and hopped in the truck for the 20 minute drive up to Huey Camp. I left my pups behind — I didn’t want to have to worry about them wandering off into the weeds where there might be snakes. The only reason I took the truck was because it was the only one of my three vehicles with a top — I keep the top down all the time on the Honda and the Jeep was in the process of getting a new roof — so it had the best air conditioning.

Huey camp is situated between two ponds that are linked by a waterway when the water levels are full. Two Hueys were parked on one side and the third was parked some distance away. Stan’s motorhome and dune buggy were parked between them, near one of the ponds. He’d positioned it so the side we’d sit on was in the shade of the big rig. The helicopter’s truck (with crane) and trailer were parked nearby, along with all kinds of orchard equipment. The spot is on a flat area on a hillside, surrounded by apple and cherry orchards, including one I’m contracted to dry. It had an excellent view of the sky, which came in handy later on.

Huey Camp from across one pond.

Two of the helicopters at Huey Camp.

We settled into chairs in the shade to chat while Stan prepped his portable BBQ grill. Stan, Brandon, and Dave were the Huey pilots. Brandon’s friend Emma, who is a new helicopter pilot, was also there. (I’d invited both of the pilots still working for me this season, but one had taken his paraglider to Spokane (!) again and the other was taking a motorcycle training course out at the airport.) Later, CJ (a JetRanger pilot) and Isaac (a falconer) joined us.

It turned out that we knew a lot of the same people and helicopters. Brandon had flown my helicopter when he was training at Quantum in Arizona, although he claims it was a different color. He’d also flown my friend Ed’s old S55 with the turbine conversion, which was now based up in Brewster on cherry work. One of the Hueys had actually been flown in Vietnam by a local guy who had come up to visit it all these years later.

Isaac had to do some work in two of the orchards and invited us to come watch. Some cherry growers use falconers to help chase birds away from their orchards. By repeatedly flying the falcons (or hawks, etc.) over the orchard blocks, birds like robins, which like to eat cherries, become convinced that a predator has moved in and they leave. That’s the idea, anyway.

Here’s Issac with one of his birds after the bird flew in the orchard. Hooding the bird is common and does not hurt the bird.

We all loaded into my truck and followed Isaac to his first worksite, which turned out to be very close. We watched him get a bird out and attach a GPS tracker to it (just in case the bird decided it wanted an extended break). Soon he’d removed the bird’s hood and it was flying over the cherry trees. Isaac had a long pole with a string and bait attached to it and swung the bait around. The goal was to get the bird to dive at the bait but not let him get it. He did this from a few locations alongside the orchard block before the bird “won” — it caught the bait. That cut that bird’s session a bit short, but Isaac had another bird with him and moved on to the next orchard. We went back to camp, mostly because Dave was hungry and I think Brandon and Emma were bored.

Stan started cooking right after that. He’d bought a rib roast and had carved it up into enormous bone-in steaks. I’d brought along my little grill and some uncooked marinated tri-tip that someone had left at my house at the BBQ and I’d frozen. I got that going and it was a good thing I did because Stan didn’t have enough room on his grill for all of the steaks so one ended up on mine. A while later, the sun was setting and we were eating steak — with horseradish, of course — potato salad, and salad off paper plates. Isaac was back by then and he joined us; I wound up giving him half the trip-tip for later in the week because there was enough regular steak for all of us.

Stargazing

After dinner, we moved over to a spot where we could see the sky to the northwest more clearly. Comet NEOWISE was a feature in the sky after sunset and I think we were all vying to be the first to spot it. One of the younger people saw it first — Brandon, I think — and over time we all saw it. The view from up there didn’t include the lights from the city, but it did include the glow from sunset.

We all started watching the sky, pointing out stars that flickered weirdly or seemed to change color. I saw a fast moving white light pass by and consulted the GoISSWatch app on my phone — sure enough, it was the space station. When I pointed it out, some of my companions were blown away. “You mean that’s the actual space station in orbit?” Dave asked. I told him it was and that there would be an even better pass just before 11 PM, right overhead.

That got us looking for satellites. Again, the younger folks with their sharper eyes spotted them quickly. Brandon got excited when he realized that he was seeing a bunch in a row. Believe it or not, I had an app for that, too: Find Starlink. Sure enough, we were seeing a Starlink satellite train that was passing overhead. I’d tried before to see one and failed miserably — now I know why: they really aren’t that bright at all.

We spent the next hour or so just watching the sky and talking. It was relaxing and kind of interesting. Our ages ranged from early 20s (Emma) through possibly 70s (Stan and Dave?). We talked about things we knew and told stories about experiences. No one had their head buried in a phone. No one argued. There was a lot of laughter. Politics stayed pretty much out of our discussions.

At 10:56, right on schedule, one of my companions spotted the space station again. We watched it travel across the sky, right overhead. I thought about the people on board and how tiny they were but how many people on earth watched them go by whenever they could. When it was gone, I decided it was time to leave. It had been a pretty good night for stargazing: a comet, two ISS passes, a Starlink train, and did I mention seeing Jupiter and Saturn in the southeastern sky?

Finishing Up the Night

It was a quick drive home. I left my truck on the driveway apron instead of putting it in the garage, mostly because I knew I’d need to drive it again the next morning on a garbage run. I let my pups out and my cats came over from wherever they were hunting to say hello. It was nearly midnight when I climbed the stairs.

But I wasn’t done. Outside, Comet NEOWISE was hanging in the sky near the lights of Wenatchee. I set up my Nikon and took a few shots with various settings, pausing now and then to study it through my binoculars and wonder what it would look like through my telescope.

Comet NEOWISE with the Wenatchee night skyline.

I was asleep by 1 AM.

Postscript

I love living alone for the privacy and freedom that it gives me. I don’t get lonely because I stay busy. Sometimes, I’m so busy that I forget to get out and socialize when I should.

But one thing I’ve come to realize: any time I’m at a gathering with friends is time well spent, especially when the friends have unusual lifestyles that involve travel and unique jobs. The other day, I had dinner with five other helicopter pilots and a falconer. How can a gathering like that not be full of fun, interesting stories and experiences?

I have a friend I call “the man of a thousand excuses” because he’s far more likely to say NO when he’s invited to do something different than YES. I don’t think he has any idea of what he’s missing.

I have an idea of what I could be missing, so I try to say YES whenever I can.

My New Telescope

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Maria Langer

I finally replace my old telescope.

My old telescope looked a lot like this modern knockoff. Meade no longer makes them.

Years and years ago, not long after moving into my Arizona home with my future wasband, I bought an 8″ Dobsonian telescope. We’d seen Jupiter and Saturn through the big telescopes at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ and were hooked. The Dobsonian was an affordable, easy to use, and relatively powerful scope, although with hindsight I came to realize it was not the right choice. It had no tracking capabilities, making it a challenge to watch an object for more than a few seconds and making any attempt at photography an utter failure.

The Old Telescope in Washington

I moved the telescope to my new home in Washington when I left Arizona during my crazy divorce. I optimistically set it up in my living room near the door to my big open deck right after the house (and deck) were finished. I think I used it once up there. Too much light pollution from nearby Wenatchee.

Another time, at the request of a friend, I brought it down to the driveway so we could watch a conjunction of Jupiter (or Saturn?) with the moon. The two objects didn’t clear the cliffs behind my house before my friends lost patience and left. I sent the telescope with them so they could experiment with it on their own.

A year or two passed. I realized quite realistically that I’d likely never use the telescope because of the combined problem of local light pollution, difficulty in moving the telescope elsewhere, and the original problem of lack of tracking. So I sold it on Craig’s list. The guy who bought it knew a lot more about it than I did and realized he was getting a good deal. I was just glad to get it out of the corner of my living room.

The New Telescope

Time went by. Light pollution in the Wenatchee area only got worse. I’m still trying to figure out why so many people need floodlights in their yards that shine upwards. (WTF?) Although my street is wonderfully dark with few homes, most of which don’t have floodlights, the ambient light is so bright that the only time my home ever gets dark is when it’s foggy out at night.

Here’s Jan’s new (to him) 16 inch telescope. He needed some modifications done to his little observatory to get it in there. He uses it for astrophotography and can operate it from a laptop inside his house. Check out his photos here.

But I travelled every winter and spent a lot of time in places with truly dark night skies. I started getting interested in astronomy again.

I also had a friend with an observatory in his backyard. He was extremely knowledgeable about telescopes and, after I accompanied him to look at a 16″ scope to replace his 12″ scope, I asked him to help me find a telescope I could travel with. The main qualification: it had to have computerized tracking.

Jan got right to work and found a nice scope for a good price in the Palm Springs area. Trouble is, I was home in Washington and not prepared to drive all the way down there to see and possibly fetch it. So he held off until I returned to Arizona this winter. I missed his first message with an option and it sold before I followed up. But I was on it for his second lead and wound up buying it.

It’s a 2003 Meade LX200 GPS in excellent condition, with tons of eyepieces and a set of filters. After checking it out with its owner, we packed it in its original box and foam, which makes it much safer to transport. It came with everything I needed to use it. And although I’ve since seen them listed for over $1,400 used, I only paid $700 for this one. A good deal.

Working Out the Bugs

Jan very graciously helped me set it back up the first time and showed me how to use it. We immediately ran into difficulties. For some reason, it wouldn’t align properly. I wouldn’t pick up GPS data from the GPS. It wouldn’t find stars and it wouldn’t track them.

I honestly didn’t think the seller had knowingly ripped me off. He had wanted me to come the night before so he could demonstrate it with something to see. I’m a decent judge of people and he did not act as if he was trying to pull a fast one. He even texted me after I left, thanking me and telling me that he hoped I enjoyed it.

Here’s my telescope set up in Jan’s backyard one morning. You can see his observatory beyond it.

We worked on the problems over several consecutive evenings. I was staying at Jan’s house so it was easy. At one point, Jan was convinced that I needed a new AutoStar controller — the device that connects to the telescope and tells it what to do. Replacing the batteries in it didn’t seem to help. Then I asked Jan to use his computer to update the firmware in the controller. He had a PC; I only have Macs. He did that on the third day and that evening we got everything working nearly perfectly. We suspected that the controller had gotten “confused” by sitting idle so long, possibly with bad batteries.

I packed up the telescope and stored it and its box of parts and tripod in Jan’s garage. I was going to Tucson for about a week and had no reason to take it with me since I wouldn’t have time to set it up and use it.

Going Solo

Jan kept telling me to read the manual and I kept trying. It was all a mystery to me so it became an excellent sleep aid while I was in Tucson.

But things changed when I returned from my trip. I fetched the telescope from Jan’s garage and stowed it in my utility trailer. I spent about a week in downtown Wickenburg, where I was showing and selling my jewelry at a big annual Art Show. Then I went off into the desert where I found an excellent campsite for the next 10 days.

One of the things I’d bought for the telescope (and had shipped to Jan’s house) was a lightweight telescope cover. The beauty of living in a desert environment is that there’s usually very little moisture in the air. That means little or no morning dew. And little rain. So I could set up the telescope near my camper, use it at night, cover it up, and not have to worry about it getting damaged during a typical 24-hour period. So I set it up, using the manual — which now had my attention — and got it all ready to use.

My telescope set up in the desert at my campsite southwest of Vulture Peak near Wickenburg, AZ.

I got it aligned by myself on the second try. The key, I realized, was to use the AutoAlign feature, which automatically figures out where it is, which way it’s pointed, and how it’s angled. All you do is fine-tune its view when it points to two different very bright stars. Once the alignment is done, you can use the AutoStar controller to point to any indexed object. I looked at Venus, the moon (which was a waning crescent at the time), Betelgeuse (which has been in the news a bit lately), the Pleiades, and the Great Nebula. In each instance, I had to adjust the view the controller suggested but, once that was done, the telescope tracked like a dream.

I also started experimenting with a WiFi device I’d bought for the telescope that let me control it with my iPhone using an app called Sky Safari. That made navigating a lot easier. It also gave me access to an “audio tour” of many night sky objects: a narrator’s voice tells you a little about the object you’re looking at enhancing the viewing experience.

I started playing with eyepieces that would change the magnification and field of view of the telescope. I had eight eyepieces, many of which looked as if they’d never been used. I discovered that stronger magnifications worked great on objects high in the sky but were too blurry for items near the horizon. Too much heat coming off the ground, making waves in the air.

I got to know a group of four people with a dog who hiked past my campsite every evening. One evening, they saw me messing with the telescope and I invited them to come back later to do some star gazing. They returned when it was fully dark and I showed them the same things I’d seen (except the moon, which was no longer in the night sky), along with some double stars and the Andromeda galaxy. This is something I never would have been able to do with the old Dobsonian because I’d have to keep re-finding the object every minute or so. They were suitably wowed.

Dawn was in the same direction as the glow from Phoenix, so I didn’t do much observing in that direction, but I did manage to catch sight of a waxing crescent moon, with Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all lined up in the morning sky.

I learned that the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were in the early morning sky, just above the horizon at sunrise. I woke on a morning with an absolutely clear view to the southeast and managed to align the telescope before it got too light to see anything. I saw four moons around Jupiter and Saturn with its rings. Mars was a reddish blur.

During this time, I watched the weather carefully. When rain appeared in the forecast, I disassembled the telescope and put it away for the rest of my stay at that site.

Beyond the Basics

Here’s the nearly finished setup for my telescope accessories. After shooting this photo I found yet another eyepiece and added it with the others. There are two layers of foam; I have to lift the top layer to get to items beneath it.

Because I didn’t like the idea of having two separate boxes for carrying around the eyepieces and other accessories needed to run the telescope, I invested $50 at Harbor Freight on a waterproof case with foam insert. I spent about an hour laying out all the accessories and cutting the foam to fit it all in. This freed up the fancy padded Meade box that the eyepieces lived in and made a more secure storage area for the spotting scope and other more delicate items. Now I have just three things to tote around: the telescope in its original padded box, the tripod (which I may make a bag for), and this new box.

I’d like to get a similar case for the telescope itself. Jan has a canvas one that fits the foam for his similar 8″ telescope, but I prefer a hard case with wheels. Still, I’m not interested in spending $400+ to buy one and to have the added weight to tote around. We’ll see what I find without looking too hard.

I also bought an external battery at Harbor Freight. Designed to jump start a car, it also has 12 volt receptacles and USB ports. The telescope came with a DC power cable so it could be used without batteries; the previous owner said he used to plug it into his car when he was using it away from home. I bought a cable that converts that to something that could be plugged into a wall so I could use it with any common power source. Otherwise, it needs 8 C batteries, which I’d hate to burn through.

The Verdict

Although I wish the telescope was smaller and lighter — the tripod weighs about 30 pounds and the telescope weighs about 40 pounds — I can’t complain about the optics, operation, or view. It’s the telescope I wish I’d bought back in the late 1990s when I first moved to Arizona and got to enjoy dark skies. It fits fine in the back seat area of my truck or in my little cargo trailer. I can easily imagine taking it on camping trips or on nighttime outings with friends.

As my winter travels wind to an end, I expect to set it up in at least two more places: the desert at Borrego Springs, where I can share views with my good friend Janet before we part ways until next winter, and possibly Death Valley National Park, where I might detour just to check out the night skies. Next year, it’ll be part of my travel gear again.

An Eclectic Mind

Web site and blog for Maria Langer, helicopter pilot, content creator, jewelry artist, boater, and serious amateur photographer.

Tag Archives: astronomy