Northern Nights [Explored] [APOD]

On 5. July, I was piloting a flight from Los Angeles to Zurich. Due to the position of the jet stream, our route took us up to 62° of northern latitude. At this time of the year, this is in the region of the polar day, which meant that it would never get fully dark during the flight. Furthermore, aurora activity forecasts were rather low with a planetary K-index of Kp=2. My hopes for capturing Lady Aurora were therefore not very high.

 

Shortly after passing Winnipeg in Canada, I noticed a weak glow over the brightening northern horizon. I quickly attached my camera to the cockpit windshield and was surprised to see a rather strong aurora display and noctilucent clouds appear on my LCD. During the next 25min, I captured a sequence of roughly 300 single exposures, which i stitched into a short time lapse movie and I also processed some of the best frames as still images. They show a rather unusual combination of atmospheric phenomena and astronomical highlights.

 

The orange horizon from a simultaneous sunset and sunrise, noctilucent clouds, dancing northern lights, the star-filled sky and some deep space targets, like the Double cluster (NGC869, NGC 884), Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and even a hint of the Triangulum Galaxy (M33) in a single image captured from an aircraft cruising at 33'000 feet... Who said you cannot have it all?

 

You can find the mentioned time lapse movie on my YouTube channel: youtu.be/zwydBbEVrZQ

 

This image was published a NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on 24. July 2021:

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210724.html

 

EXIF

Canon EOS Ra

Samyang 24mm f/1.4 @ f/2

Mount: Boeing 777-300ER

5s @ ISO800

Done