Hello there Michael,
indeed, with discussion on this matter on the french forums, we thought also that giving the fact that matter tends to follow magnetic lines, the shape seen from my location where not rectilinear as it appear to be, but curved towards the south, like you wrote also, showing the display you photographed the week before.
I too made a search for other watchers, first in France, starting by finding anyone who got the auroras in the first place at this date.
And I found out that Emmanuel Beaudoin
did, revealing photogenic display.
So I
answered to it then Emmanuel made a new work on his images, to try to get the blue columns in the images (post corresponding to the the link I mentioned indeed in my 2nd November message and that
you quoted in you private message).
We found also some more watcher from France, but a few for the 4h00 am pulse, and none of them got enough height (too narrow filed of view with the lenses used) to be sure what part of the image was the base of the blue column,
in order to better triangulate the position.
I also tried to draw the attention of Spaceweather's Dr Tony Philips on this , but without any success for now (
photo submissions + email).
I guess that with the amount of mails he can get daily, it is hard to focus on everything.
In the french forum, we reached the point in the discussion up to the "sunlit auroras" phenomenon for now, like it has been mentioned there by Laura Kranich. This sun light effect might explain partially why the column can be so bright at this height.
For my images, indeed the compression of the videos are not good for analysis, but I also made a
shared folder on my drive in which the original videos can be found.
I can also provide the processed images I used to make those videos. While making them go back and forth (can be done easily with VirtuaDub), you can estimate more clearly, with the motion, the height of the column (reaching, for what I can see, about 60 to 65° giving the star in the field of view)
A lot of us also managed to photograph the auroras from last 5th November, but with more clouds. This time I decided to move outside my house with some cameras in order to get the horizon, and hopefully to catch more blue rays with more fisheye lenses.
Maybe you saw the last post on Flickr about this, with a process (in black and white this time) showing an interesting vertical extension of the blue pillars. But I have not done any other work on this, to see if this is the same phenomenon as GBR. But giving the angle of view (Azimut ~ 315°), I should have seen a bend shapefor thos if any there.
Anyways, I'm looking forward for more of those phenomenon, answers there and in other forums.
Blue cheers from Jura
Nicolas R.
PS: I manage to recover your email, that ended to the spam somehow.
I will answer to you, hopefully this Wednesday night.
What an exciting and challenging project you described there!
