May 25, 2014 – The Amazing Sky

The strange rock formations of Red Rock Coulee, Alberta lie below the cloudscape of a prairie sky.

Yesterday afternoon I visited the Red Rock Coulee Natural Area, a dramatic but little known geologic wonder in southern Alberta. I was inspecting the site for a possible return one night to shoot time-lapse nightscapes. But while there I took the time to shoot daytime cloudscapes.

The image above is a two-section panorama with an ultra-wide 14mm lens.

This image and the one below are other compositions in this very photogenic spot. In the distance lie the peaks of the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana.

These odd rock formations are sandstone concretions deposited in prehistoric seas and are apparently some of the largest examples of this type of formation in the world. Iron content gives them their red tone.

As a technical note, all the images are high-dynamic range (HDR) stacks of 8 exposures taken over a wide range of shutter speeds to record details in both the bright sky and darker shadows.

I processed them with Photoshop CC’s HDR Pro module and then Adobe Camera Raw in 32-bit mode. I aimed for a more natural look than you see in most HDR images, but even so the cloud contrast is exaggerated for dramatic effect. The wide-angle lens perspective adds to the effect.

This was a wonderful place to stand under the big skies of southern Alberta on a warm spring afternoon.

Here’s a time-lapse of the strange glow of light that moved across the northern sky on the night of the Camelopardalid meteor shower.

What I thought was an odd curtain of slow-moving, colourless aurora — and I’ve seen those before — has many people who also saw it suspecting it was a glow from a fuel dump from an orbiting satellite. Perhaps.

This short time-lapse of 22 frames covers about 22 minutes starting at 11:59 pm MDT on May 23 (as logged by the camera’s GPS). Each frame is a 60-second exposure taken at 2 second intervals. I’m playing them back at one frame per second.

The camera was on a tracking platform to follow the stars — thus the ground slowly rotates. This was one of the cameras I had operating the night of May 23-24 to capture meteors from the Camelopardalid meteor shower. The shower was a dud, but …

The most interesting thing my cameras did catch was this odd glow which started large and diffuse and then became more defined as it got smaller and moved off (or so it appears) to the north, then fades away. My photos (and I have it on frames from another camera), and photos taken by other observers across North America, show a faint satellite moving along south to north parallel to the cloud’s long axis. Is this the culprit that caused the cloud? If so, it would have to be very high to be seen from a wide range of longitudes – astronomers in Manitoba and Minnesota also saw and shot it.

But any fuel dumps I’ve seen always have clouds that start small and concentrated then become large and diffuse. This did the opposite.

I’ll await further analysis and explanation.

P.S.: You can watch a better version of the movie here at my Flickr site.