As my not-quite-hobby photography skills embark on their first steps, I found myself next to the hoodoos in Drumheller last night. Little did i know that I would witness something later, that I will very likely not see for quite a long time.
After leaving from friends, a massive storm system was rolling into cow town. I was chasing the meteor shower happening this weekend. As I raced out east to get ahead of the storm and out of cloud cover I kept close watch on the skies and where the storm was moving. It appeared to be moving NW to SE through the sky. But it was huge. And hour later I was out in Drumheller area and decided to drive east of the town to get an unobstructed view of the north-eastern sky. So many insects on the road there and the true massacre was only evident the morning after.
Finally I could take a few shots of the night sky. I fired up CHDK and started taking some pictures. With the lighting in the distance, a strange purple patch of light kept interfering with my shots. I kept on the lookout for meteors burning up in the atmosphere, but disappointingly, there were not nearly as many as I had witnessed nearly 7 years earlier.
The storm kept approaching and I decided to give it some attention. I had not tried to photograph lightning before, but I found it surprisingly easy once you have stared at the storm and it’s location for a while.
On the way back I found a spot on top of a hill in the middle of a field where I pulled over and took some more shots. It was then that I noticed the green glow of an old friend in the sky – Aurora borealis. There is something so calming and comforting about her seemingly silent playfulness. And we have undocumented history.
I paused. “How many people have witnessed all three of these things before?” I wondered. I took some more time to appreciate what I was witnessing. Northern lights, a meteor shower and a storm, which I was ahead of. Then I pulled out the camera and tried capturing all three in action. Could I capture all three of these in one picture?
Then the low battery light blinked.
Fuck.
Now I need to learn how to minimize digicam noise.