STEVE heads by the auroral dunes?
Taken by Matthew Wheeler on April 16, 2021 @
Robson Valley, BC Canada
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Camera Used: NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D750
Exposure Time: 1/1
Aperture: f/1.4
ISO: 6400
Date Taken: 2021:04:24 02:28:43
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Details:
It’s a contrail! But is it also STEVE? And auroral dunes? Working on an unrelated time lapse, I glanced north and saw a glow in the blue sky. A hasty test photo showed intense purple next to green. In the time it took to dismount the camera and relocate I only got a few frames before the purple rays disappeared, but they looked and moved west rapidly like STEVE.
In the same photos I was surprised to see bright horizontal bands in the green. At first I thought they looked like auroral dunes, and so photographed the entire remaining show for video.
But I was still suffering from contrail–STEVE fatigue from the night before, when a ghostly track had meddled with each visual search for STEVE. Again, this night I noted a jet heading into the sunset, same path. Its very slow south-moving contrail, and an older one crossing it, were the only blemishes in the otherwise pristine sky.
20 minutes into the event, the now moonlit contrails had formed distinctly horizontal patterns too. By the time the storm subsided and I headed for bed, I thought I had probably wasted memory card space photographing contrail patterns that were blocking light from a smooth green glow.
However, viewing the sequence shows the contrails were moving slowly south, consistent with the jet stream direction in northern Canada. The green bands are moving north-west, more slowly but the same as the other auroral textures, and they look very similar to other people’s videos of dunes.
If confirmed that they were STEVE and dunes, and I was a kid still using slides, I would have been pleased to have captured Mars, Moon and these events on one expensive piece of film!
Photographer's website:
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