Monday, June 29, 2009

Sprite above Austria: amateur colour photo from Hungary

I would like to share a story about a colour sprite photo from Mónika Landy-Gyebnár. She is a Hungarian amateur astronomist and was out to take noctilucent cloud pictures on the night of 19. June. Having no luck with her original purpose she aimed her camera at a storm approaching from North-West from Austria and she started to shoot frames continuously.



As she examined the photos later she has discovered a sprite on one of them!





The peculiar side of the story is that she took the picture at ISO400(!) with 13 second frame integration period. The camera was a Konica-Minolta Dynax 5D DSLR equipped with Sigma 20mm F1.8 DG RF lens. The actual F value, however, was 2.8.

The story was published online in Hungarian on the Hungarian news portal of astronomy.

Cheers, Jozsef