Cherry Spring Aurora
During the last weekend of October 2000, my friend Steve Walters and I traveled to Cherry Springs State Park in Galeton, Pennsylvania for a weekend of camping and stargazing. About an hour and a half northwest of Williamsport, Cherry Springs is both REMOTE and DARK. It was Steve’s second time there and my first, but neither my own previous experiences observing from dark sites in Vermont and Maine or Steve’s description of Cherry Springs could prepare me for the sky I was about to see.
In a word the experience was SPECTACULAR! Friday October 27th was only partly clear. As dusk arrived, so did the rain, but by 10pm or so, it had cleared enough for us to set up the scopes and observe for a while. We chased holes in the overcast for about two or three hours before it closed up completely. We awoke the next morning to gray skies, but during the day a cold front passed and cleared out the atmosphere leaving a crystal clear sky at dusk. That night we were treated to the darkest, clearest sky I have ever seen. The Milky Way stood out beautifully with strikingly defined dark rifts. The Andromeda Galaxy was clearly visible to the naked eye with direct vision, and the fainter galaxy M33 was prominent in 8x56 binoculars. Telescopically, when the double cluster was overhead, it was hard to tell where cluster edge was (in 8" f/7 at 30x) because the surrounding Milky Way was so bright. Enhancing the experience was an unexpected view of the Aurora Borealis thanks, as I later learned, to a solar storm a couple of days earlier.
I had only seen the aurora once before, at a Stellafane convention in the early ‘90s. The Stellafane aurora was quite spectacular with dancing curtains of pulsating light, which at times reached the zenith, and I thought myself to be lucky to have experienced that. The Cherry Springs aurora on October 28th put my Stellafane experience to shame, however!
This aurora beat that one hands down. Color was prominent, mostly red mixed in with the overall white/blue glow. Rays of light pulsed up from the horizon like searchlights well above Polaris. Bands of light slowly rippled across the northern horizon and bright patches waxed and waned. At times the brightness obscured some of the stars in the bowl of the Big Dipper.
I decided to take a chance photographing this light show. I had come prepared with a barndoor mount, but ran into some technical difficulties mounting it to a tripod that I had never used it on before, so the best I could do was mount my camera directly to the tripod. I used 28 and 50 mm lenses, and bracketed exposures from about 30 seconds to two minutes. Several of the results are shown here. The film used was Ektachrome 200. Slides were scanned into Kodak Photo CD and edited using Picture Window. Editing consisted of adjusting the brightness and color saturation levels, scaling and cropping. The brightness on the resulting images is approximately as I remember the actual aurora. I was unable to adjust the color exactly, so some areas, which appeared as red, are neutral or bluish on the images. Nevertheless, the images are a pretty good representation of the actual experience, except of course for the dynamics.