I saw the auroras for the first time in my 19 year old life tonight. Sadly, I live in the city, so there are lights everywhere. Therefore, it was only a faint green-gray glow in the sky (too dim to take a photo with my phone), and I can't see anything right now (23:28 local time). I live in Trondheim (63.4 degrees north).
I feel your pain, C3PO. It has not been a cloud on the sky the last five days, but now, three days before the eclipse, the forecast predicts clouds with rain on Friday, so I will probably be disappointed. The Moon will cover 93.9 % of the Sun, and the next time the Moon will cover that much during an eclipse is in September 2126 ...
---------- Post added 18th Mar 2015 at 01:47 ---------- Previous post was 17th Mar 2015 at 23:31 ----------
OK, I take that back.
I went out into a nearby forest to try to catch the auroras.
I was outside for about an hour (from 23:45 to 01:00 local time). The conditions are not perfect, as there is some light pollution. I lived outside a normal sized city before (10 km from a city with population of 40 000), and could then see something like 5 times as many stars as now. To illustrate it, I could
just see the star Megrez in Ursa Major (I believe it's called "The Big Dipper" in English?), which has a magnitude of +3.3. It was close to zero clouds.
This was as mentioned earlier the first time I have seen the auroras, so I have little reference when it comes to judging the activity, but it blew out into full brightness three or four times in the hour I was outside, and the brightness was then something like Jupiter.
I attempted to take pictures of the aurora with my phone, but it was of course hard to get.
Here are my best shots:
South. The bright dot is Jupiter.
West. The city lights of Trondheim are shown.
North. A power line in the foreground.
North/up.
All photos are at ISO 2900, 1/9 second shutter speed, f/2.4. I used manual exposure +2. Captured with an LG G3 (2014) running CyanogenMod 12 Nightly using the Google Camera app.
A webpage I read recommended a shutter speed of at least 30 seconds when imaging auroras with a DSLR. My photos are of course not good, but considering the conditions, it seems like it was as good as it could get.
Beautiful
