At last after more than a week of freezing cold the warm air has returned and once again the promise of summer is in the air. The first breeding success has registered with the scrambling calls of newly hatched starlings come from deep within the old wifes dike. The breeding season in the garden is looking good just now with song thrush,dunnock,greenfinch and robins paired up. Sparrows blackbirds and starlings are going at it as well!!. Down the fields we have common gull, lapwing, oystercatcher and snipe on the go. There are several nests of curlew around the house and the bubbling in the air counterpoints the mipits and skylarks wonderfully.....chance of northern lights tonight !!

 Its Beltain baby, the year kicks in gear. We will be having a wee fire once it darkens down a bit. In the mean time this is a

primus type stove i bought at an old mart sale. Just been getting it going for the first time in a while. Might look for a coffee pot for the shed next......ya all have a good Beltain.!

 Well well six years on are stirrings  once again, is theis blog going to wake from coma, fuck knows but I smell bacon on the air....

Two years on.

Well here we are again, two years on.....darkness is once again returning. With all the bollocks and personalities that are involved with the aurora I thought I might keep this for having a wee spout off rather than facebook.Its nearly the the start of the sorry old grouse season so if you like your grouse live and flapping you have come to the right place...its quite quiet as it goes just now. Wind speed is picking up a bit and theres a chance of a glow over the weekend. Its also the Persids shooting stars this weekend. Unfortunatly its not going to be the bigest display in human history as advertised by some groups on facebook. It has been interesting to watch as the story developed. After the first meme was shared about it was fairly dismissed and debunked but yet astronomy and science pages were seting the same message to new graphics in an effort to seem if they were the ones predicting this huge event. Its all quite amusing but makes you think how much you can trust the veracity of the rest of their pages......not that mine is run by any kind of expert i should add....lol.

Atlast something in the sky to post as noc cloud sweeps over followed by more cloud.

95

Another poor night of colour with it taking 60 seconds to draw out the colour. The glow was easly seen by the eye tho.,,,kp1 !!

Multo marginalie

After such a fine show the next night brought a good amount of cloud ands a show. I have seen nice photos from Skye last night. Here was a different story tho. We were clouded out from stare to bed time. All i managed was a couple of shots of the sky through the gaps. There is a red glow to be seen each tome the clouds part but they just wouldnt split enough to show....marginal is the discription for 94.

92 came last night although it to some teasing to show its face. 93 tonight has come storming in as a slow moving filliment eruption was thrown in by a faster moving flare cme. Its gerat conditions overhead and we have not been disapointed !!

The earths magnetic field has settled down , this along with the full moon and there has been little to be seen for nights. The nights now are shortening as summer rushes towards us. The end of the season for me is getting closer.

Ooops.

91

 Four days since my last sighting, frustratingly I was down with a bad back. I missed at least one night. Managed to get back in tow now tho with a display last night that showed very well against the strong moon light.

90

A thin show starting out tonight but there is time yet. Nice ring about the moon tho !

89

88

88 came up fast last night only to drop back as fast. Two brief views on consecutive nights. Conditions are still elivated and the EPAM looks good. Roll on darkness.

A wee photostream of the last few nights.

87 Just crept over the horizon. I dont know if its going to clear enough to get a propper view tho.

The rest of the catch up

The night after the CME produced another small show as a precurser to the morning of the eclipse. Needless to say although it was a little cloudy the almost total eclipse was a spectacular affair. The night produced another display that was seen a long way south, a great day !! The next night produced the curious blob as a rogue ribbon of light  pusated from the eastern side of the sky overhead and off to the south south west. The ribbon was actualy south of us !! The night of the 22 produced the start of a display before being lost to the cloud....So thats all up to date at 86. its been a cracking week in to the equniox and tonight we are missing storming conditions to the cloud cover.....I feel a photo stream coming on......

Catching up a bit.

81 showed little more than a difuse show on the horizon before dropping back to show later in the night. 82 came storming in to produce the biggest show this year. The awaited CME produced aurora that was seen all over the UK. We suffered like a lot of places with mist and fog. Unfortunatly it seemed to suck the colour out of the sky. The display was massive tho with hours of bands passing overhead fading and growing. Ocasionaly it would stop moving and seem to fall out the sky in a coronal display that would go on and on.. A great night even with the conditions......83 is on right now as im typing. Theres a lot of cloud obscuring it but its showing green to higher than 50 deg !!!....theres more of the update to come tonight.

80

Waiting for a storming display thats not happening by the look of it. It seems the x flare cme passed us by. Still its a good night and we havecolour so we will see what will be !!

79

We are in reasonably exciting times just now. Of course if you start to think like that it seems you are doing nothing but preparing your self for yet another long stand in the cold with an anti climax in the end. Over the nights of the10^th and 11^th I was hoping for a glancing blow from an earlier CME. Over the last two nights the positive magnetic field has pushed almost everything away from us and there has been almost nothing to be seen. Ironicaly we have had a couple of the finest clearest nights you could wish for. Even the huge moon is rising later and helping to give us nice dark skys from the off. EPAM has risen but there is so much going on I think it is more of a harbinger of current flare activity happening now. The previous few days have seen 2297 producing continuous flaring with loads of C class, several strong M class, some of which produced coronal mass ejections and while not coming directly at us are expected to have some influence. last night the one we are all waiting for an X2.2 with a CME came ripping out followed by another M class. NOAA has a storm warning in place now and they are expecting potential effects from the Ms to scrape past us and stir the pot. 2297 Is now coming in to a position where it will be fully geo effective. It still maintains a complicated magnetic structure which is good because it means there is still some potential for more very big flares as it really starts to face us. We are about to feel the effects of an incoming HSS from a recurring equatorial hole CH658. Hopefully the high speed solar wind and the clouds of plasma will cook up something for us. All kitchen analogies aside I am really hoping that this is one pot that will boil over on the stove.......With all that said we all know fine there are no givens in this game. Many of you will have stood here before, X flare hurling towards us with the UK press hyping it and expectations sky high so lets be realistic. There is the potential for lights over the next two nights, maybe even more. As the last two nights and other X events as well have shown it is just as easy for all of this to simply bounce off the magnetic field and carry on past us, and after all this is what the planets magnetic field does so well, protect us from this dangerous shit. That aside I am some looking forwards to darkness. The game may just be afoot.

78

It seems like ages since I managed some colour but tonight with a breal in the endless clouds and the big moon yet to rise I managed to catch this difuse aurora. Stats are really poor and once the moon started to take hold there was little for my poor old camera to pull out. Im just waiting noe and going to seed if the field comes south for a bit and go for it again....Its really thin stuff out there.

There are storm warnings for the weekend this weekend due to a HS SSBC. Last night was a wash out and probably had the best show, tonight is less active but there is a faint arc visable. At the moment im waiting for some expansion.

It took a lot of shots to find 76 eventualy tho I caught it with a 4am fast snap. This was one of those shots that you manage to take and run back to bed before you wake up to much. I only realised I had it the next night when I looked through before deleting....Marginal to say the least !!

23 feb.

Last night my season total reached 75. This is a bit of a psycological milestone for me raising the chance of dare I say it.....no I wont just now !! Its all to easy jinx things. Last nights display came storming in in solid style. There was red showing way up in the sky to 50-60 deg. With such a tall display showing it was seen all over the UK, well those who had a view through the clouds that it. Cloud cover had a few issues for us as well. We never realy got to see a wide horizon anywhere I went last night. With this in mind and along with some badly failed panorama shots spurred me on to head out and hit a couple of classic locations for some narrower views. The subjects chosen were the standing stones of Brodgar and Stenness and for once I was lucky enough to hit both stone circles whilst they were empty and the aurora provided a nice backdrop for the shots. I allways prefer the location empty for the atmosphere plus its less of a pain in the arse for everybody else while im doing short exposures to set up a composition with a light painting torch. All in all Its been huge fun.....here are some shots from the standing stones......hope you enjoy.

We have activity tonight as astronomical darkness is falling. ACE is looking great but snowy showers are tracking towards us....Photos and more to follow as things develop.......

74

Tonight the skys have cleared as we wait for snow. Theres a fair glow going on although it took a while to find a gap in the clouds.

73

I wasnt expecting much at all but the lights are being seen down the east coast. Its poor out with cloudy skies and wintery showers.

72

Moving out of the HSS now and things are quietning down. We got thin activity but lost it behind clouds and rain. Through the ocasional gaps you could see that it wasnt coming to much and like that it stayed.

71

Along wait for the cloud to open finaly produced some colour. Its more rotten conditions just like last night. Last night was worse as it goes, a second night of strong displays missed out on. Never mind tho lots of folks saw it a long way south so thats pretty good. It took a long exposure to bring this out and im right happy with my intervalometer opperating the bulb setting.

A collection of last nights shots for 70.

70

I hit 70 tonight although Im saving celebrations untill my 75th. Its been a good strong show, a nice change from the thin colour of late !