Scozmo's Photery

Here’s hoping!

I’ve said it before, we are so lucky to live on a low hill (in a house) with almost totally North facing views to an almost totally dark sky, as more people move here, there seem to be more outside lights appearing. Why? You moved to the country, it’s dark here 🙂

Anyway, weather permitting I have started setting up a camera to time lapse shots from first dark through to morning light or the batteries run out! I never really took a break, again weather permitting, I was doing the same most of the year but, more recently, in the hope of capturing Noctilucent cloud shows, which I did manage a few times 🙂

August 5th I saw the potential for a clear sky so I set the camera up when we went to bed, to start around 23:45 (11:45 PM) the end time varies now but is currently around 03:00. As the nights get longer and it’s dark earlier, I have to really think about what I might or want to capture.

Shooting through a window isn’t ideal but is fine for my requirements, I’d much rather shoot outside, I bought a rain hood for the camera / lens but, there are obvious hazards with that and our weather these days is so varied!!!

What do I mean by “set up the camera”?

I use a Nikon Z7II for almost all of these setups but I also have a Nikon Z50 that I’ll draft in if there’s a particularly good show ….. and I’m awake 😳 All of this has been quite hit and miss, I’m not a great fan of manuals 😄

I have a shortcut to Interval timer shooting and that’s where all my setup is as you can see in the second shot. (Ignore the settings in these shots)

I find the End day/time display at the bottom of the screen very useful in allowing me to set up the Interval / Interval x shots options. These are; how long between each shot and how many of them do you want? As I set the number of shots, the End time increases / decreases.

Please note, this is Nikon and others will of course vary but I’d imagine fairly similar? There are also a few more settings that need to be thought about but that’s about all I set up, apart from placing it on a Joby GorillaPod!!!! If it is in the window, that is.

So, August 5th!

You may need to adjust your screen brightness to see them clearly but, I caught a faint Aurora just after 1 AM.

Those are four shots selected from over 1000. I edit the shots in Lightroom, basing the edits on one image; paste those edits onto all the others and Export them to Jpeg with my watermark added in the process. I often go through all the shots fairly quickly, looking for other anomalies like meteors and shooting stars or …………… Who knows what? 😉

So the final time-lapse clip looks like this.

I now use a federated sharing medium rather than YouTube, slowly breaking away from all those standard, corporate (anti)-social platforms.

So that’s hopefully the start of Aurora season for us, I still record whether there is one forecast or not, just for the star shots, star trails and so on, such as on August 8th, a perfectly clear night / morning with nothing much to see at all….. except this.

A meteorite? Seems to wiggle a bit but the length of the trail tells me it was fast, my shots are 4 seconds each and there was nothing in the previous or following shots………. hmmmmmmm 😉

I said there was nothing much to see? Well, it was very cloudy when the camera started, that cleared, the full Moon came up and lit up the surrounding area quite spectacularly aaaaaaaand, there was a very faint Aurora show. Not only that, there appears to be a little display of Noctilucent clouds at the end, over by the tree!! Here are some shots from the whole show.

Look at the range of visible sky, the light variation and if you look closely, there is a pale green band along the horizon.

And so to the last set between 2 AM and 3:30 AM, the last shot, look closely at the latter few and you’ll see the pale pink / purple of the Aurora.

Finally, before the entire time-lapse clip ….

The effects of the full Moon can be seen on the field and the tree and the pale Noctilucent clouds to the left of the tree.

And so the season begins and here’s hoping it’s a great one 😉🤞

Alyth skies

our night sky