Did I capture an Aurora? - Forums

Topic starter

Feb 26, 2023

I was imaging M94 last night and when previewing the data using the Blink feature of PixInsight I noticed several frames with 'something' on them. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't any external light source affecting and was wondering if I captured a random aurora. Each frame was 120 seconds.

What do you all think?

aurora.mp4

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andrea tasselli

Frequent contributor

Feb 26, 2023

Doesn't seem likely, maybe more like sprites.

AstroBertUK

Topic starter

Feb 26, 2023

Would sprites last that long? These frames covered a period of around 8 minutes.

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John Hayes

Frequent contributor

Feb 26, 2023

Aurora seems unlikely (though not impossible). Were there any clouds in the sky that you could see with the naked eye? Were there any other reports of Aurora sightings in your area?

John

andrea tasselli

Frequent contributor

Feb 26, 2023

Would sprites last that long? These frames covered a period of around 8 minutes.

Don't need to last very long, just enough to be recorded. The position is rather southward for auroras though not impossible. The size however seems to rule them out, plus most likely they would have been deep green or red (less likely blue and pink).

AstroBertUK

Topic starter

Feb 26, 2023

Thanks John, Andrea,

I'm really not too sure what it is TBH. The skies were clear at the time, and I've since checked spaceweather.com and it's unlikely that it was aurora.
It's a mystery to me 👽

gfunkernator

Feb 27, 2023

These look exactly what I was seeing on my frames, which was caused by stray light leaking into my image train.

Yuxuan

Feb 27, 2023

These transient objects are extremely small in angular size, only a few arcminutes. I think they are too small to be aurora or sprites, but I don't have a good idea what they may be.

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AstroBertUK

Topic starter

Feb 27, 2023

caused by stray light leaking into my image train

I thought of that as a possibility. The image train has been untouched for a couple of weeks, and I've not seen anything like this before. I'll keep an eye for it occurring again, and thanks for the suggestion.

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