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Last night was a frigid, totally clear sky night and the northern lights forecast said low solar activity. So I pointed our IP camera north and bashed out a few scripts to record continuously and create a long-exposure star trail photo, hoping to have a really clean star trail. Yes, I have nothing better to do at night…

Turns out, we did get northern lights - and some light pillars too. So technically my clean star trail is ruined. But the image still looks cool.

At least that gave me an opportunity to make a timelapse video of the northern lights with the source images I used for the star trail, which you can see here:

Northern lights timelapse video

That’s really cool actually. How far north are you?

Roughly at the arctic circle.

Anyone know what those big flashes are? The “stars” in the picture without trails. I saw one of them in the video as a bright flash.

Aircraft probably. The airport is 20 mi south of here and quite a few airplane routes head due north.

Geosynchronous satellites