Tag Archives: video

Aurora Out My Window

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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.

Aurora Dashboard
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.

Short Term Forecast
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.

First Aurora Shot
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.

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

Another Aurora Shot
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.

My YouTube Surprise

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I check into my AdSense account and find a bunch of money.

I’ve been publishing helicopter videos on YouTube for more than 10 years. I was always fiddling around with one kind of camera or another, getting footage in flight, and then putting that footage online. Lots of people found it interesting. I just thought it was neat to share something that had become quite commonplace to me.

In 2016, I set up my YouTube account for monetization. That means that when YouTube put an ad at the beginning of one of my videos, I’d get a cut of the money they collected from the advertiser. I didn’t expect it to be very much — after all, it wasn’t as if my videos went viral or anything. I didn’t even have that many subscribers.

That apparently all changed at least a year ago. Somehow, the Flying M Air YouTube channel attracted more than 43,000 subscribers. And one of my videos — Home to Airport, by Helicopter — got 8.6 million views.

I didn’t know this. I’d set up YouTube to contact me via a Gmail account I never check so I never got any communication from them. I actually learned all this the other day when I was poking around my YouTube channel.

Wow, I thought to myself. That’s kind of cool. But shouldn’t I have earned some money with all those views?

I poked around some more. I wanted to make sure I’d set up YouTube with the correct banking information. I had a hard time finding where the settings for that were. But before I found it, I found something else: $7,700 of earnings in my AdSense account.

My Earnings
Surprise!

It seems that for the past three years, Google had been collecting ad revenue on ads played at the beginning of some of my videos and had been faithfully recording my share in my account on their system.

But why wasn’t I getting paid? It turned out that I’d never completed the setup — I’d never given Google my tax ID or banking information. Duh-oh!

You can bet I handed over that information as soon as I figured out where I needed to enter it.

And the next morning, all that money appeared magically in my savings account.

Needless to say, I’m now very motivated to create new videos. I hadn’t realized it, but it had been about two years since I uploaded one. There were hundreds of comments waiting to be moderated and many were from people asking me why I wasn’t making more videos.

I’ve been doing a bit of flying lately and I set up one of my GoPros to capture video and audio of most of my flights. I put together the other day and, a day later, created a short at the end of that flight.

Bonneville Dam
One of the highlights of Tuesday’s flight was an overflight of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River.

I just went through the new comments on those videos. Most folks are thanking me for uploading new videos and telling me they want more. It’s very rewarding — and I’m not talking about the fraction of a cent I get for each view. It’s nice to know folks are out there waiting for new content. It’s nice to have them welcome me back as if they really missed me.

I’ll do my best to record new videos while flying — including new cherry drying videos this summer — and get them online. I hope you’ll check them out and maybe even subscribe to my YouTube channel: FlyingMAir.

Helicopter Minimum Altitudes

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I’m working on a much longer blog post, with photos, about my recently completed autumn vacation, but I thought I’d put this shorter post out because it’s quick and on my mind.

It started with someone on Twitter sharing a video from inside the cockpit of a helicopter flying low and fast over a forest road. There were no cars on the road and no poles or wires. It was an exciting little flight that reminded me of the kind of canyon flying I used to do in some very familiar, remote areas of Arizona. See for yourself.

Helicopter video screenshot.
Here’s a screenshot from the video in question.

What followed was a bunch of comments, including some from a few people too lazy to look up the regulations who claimed that flying like that was illegal. When I pointed out that it was not illegal in the US, a particularly lazy, uninformed idiot quoted my tweet with a portion of the FARs in an attempt to prove me wrong. He didn’t. All he proved is that like so many people these days, he’s only capable of reading until he gets confirmation of what he wants the truth to be. The rest doesn’t matter.

Here’s the entire FAA regulation covering minimum flight altitudes in the US:

§91.119   Minimum safe altitudes: General.

Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:

(a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.

(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.

(c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.

(d) Helicopters, powered parachutes, and weight-shift-control aircraft. If the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface—

(1) A helicopter may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section, provided each person operating the helicopter complies with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the FAA; and

(2) A powered parachute or weight-shift-control aircraft may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (c) of this section.

[Doc. No. 18334, 54 FR 34294, Aug. 18, 1989, as amended by Amdt. 91-311, 75 FR 5223, Feb. 1, 2010]

Did you read paragraph (d) and paragraph (1) right beneath it? I did, but the know-nothing twit pretending to be an expert on Twitter didn’t. It basically says that the paragraphs he quoted (paragraphs (b) and (c) above) don’t apply to helicopters.

I distinctly remember this FAR coming up during my primary training back in the late 1990s. It basically gives helicopter pilots permission to fly at any altitude they need or want to, given that “if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.”

Take a look at the video. It looks to me as if the pilot is 50-100 feet off the ground. He’s moving at a good clip — at least 60 knots. (I tried to read the airspeed indicator but couldn’t.) With that altitude and airspeed combination, he’s not operating in the shaded area of the height/velocity diagram (or “deadman’s curve“). That means that a safe emergency landing is possible. And with nice smooth pavement beneath him, there’s plenty of suitable space for a landing if it was necessary. So it’s not in violation of paragraph (a) either.

Watch My Helicopter Videos on YouTube

Time for a shameless plug…

Flying M Air Logo

If you like helicopters, you’ll love the FlyingMAir YouTube Channel. Check it out for everything from time-lapse annual inspections to cockpit POV autorotation practice to a flight home from a taco dinner at a friend’s house — and more.

Lots of people don’t get this. They assume the altitude rules apply equally to all aircraft. But they don’t. This makes it pretty clear. Trouble is, there are too many self-important assholes out there — especially on Twitter — who share inaccurate or incomplete information as fact — and too many lazy people willing to believe them without doing their own homework.

If you want to read more about this topic, here’s an old, long, rambling post I wrote about an experience related to this years ago.

Oh, and by the way, this post is about whether the flight is legal in the US. I won’t make any comments about whether it’s safe or whether the pilot is using good judgement. That’s a whole different topic.