Author Archives: greg
Arctic terns triptych
Love birds. I miss birds.
Another fireworks photo
Quadrantid meteor shower
Happy New Year 2022
On my side, I’m staying optimistic :).
Happy New Year 2022 to everyone, hoping this year will bring everything you are hoping for.
Another serie of polar lights
Lidar in the clouds / Astrophotography
At AWIPEV, we are shooting this green laser beam into the sky, we called that a lidar. The beam will reflect back to our observatory and it will give us an indication of what type of particles, the amount of them and also how high they are. Those particles play a big role into cloud formation and that the reason we are studying them.
We usually always shoot when there is a clear sky above us. I was playing around with my equatorial mount and I wanted to have a long exposure of the sky. The sky was indeed very clear. Therefore, the lidar was in operation. At some point, it became cloudy and you can see on the picture how the lidar is behaving when it encounter particles in the air. You can also see M45 (Pleiades) in the Taurus constellation (lower center in the aurora), Perseus constellation (in the middle), Auriga (lower left) and the laser is going through Cassiopea.
Even the moon is making halo
So much different atmospheric event lately. Here’s a moon halo caused by light refraction and reflection on tiny ice crystals in the atmosphere.