October was filled with photo opportunities, almost too many for my schedule. The first couple of weeks had some incredible aurora displays, hopefully everyone was able to see them. Here in the USA, for a couple of nights, the displays were seen in all fifty states; not sure the last time that occurred or if it ever has previously. Hockey season has started, so that fills a few nights a week plus we had a comet streak past our planet, so I spent a few nights attempting to capture images of that short-lived event. Then to cap off the month, last weekend our local Peoria Rivermen hockey team celebrated a young woman's accomplishment from the summer, it was Anna Peplowski who is part of Team USA women's swim team and she helped them earn a Silver Medal in the Paris Olympic games and I can tell you that medal is heavy. I hope everyone is enjoying the beginning of fall in the Northern Hemisphere and spring for my friends in the Southern Hemisphere.

While I have not seen any super colorful displays with the leaves changing, thought we would share color from the Aurora Borealis (aka Northern Lights) from a few weeks ago. Part of my idea to capture this was to have some interesting foreground subjects and for some reason wind turbines came to mind, so I took a short drive north to avoid light pollution as much as possible - never thought about all the planes flying into and out of Chicago that made capturing the light display interesting. Along the bottom of the image are red lights from the wind farms further to the north from my location. Hard to believe this particular night there were three substorms of intense colors, this image was captured in the second storm, around 9pm, and the third one was near midnight - tough getting up for the following day's schedule. Camera Data: 16mm 15 sec F4 ISO1600

Our second image is another astronomy-related capture, it's of  C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) - a comet from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on January 9, 2023 and independently found by ATLAS South Africa on February 22, 2023. For those who do not know, ATLAS is an abbreviation for Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System run by NASA, it consists of four telescopes around the world that take pictures every night looking for objects that may impact the earth. This comet was good and bad, good since it was visible in North America shortly after sunset but bad as it was low in the sky and also set a few hours later; this image was captured about 7:40pm. For this image, I mounted a couple of cameras on my telescope mount, sans telescope and captured images over a few nights learning new lessons each evening; for the first few nights the moon was visible to make things a little more challenging, in this image you can see clouds in the sky illuminated by the nearly full moon - sorry the moon was behind me and not available for a cameo in this image. Ironically a new comet was discovered recently by the ATLAS program but a few days ago was broken up by the sun when it was making a close pass to our favorite little star. Camera Data: 400mm 5 sec F4 ISO1250

Here's a link to download the appropriate version of this month's image for your desktop, one for standard screens and one for wide-screens along with a Mobile Phone Image. For desktop computers or tablets, Right click on the text for the format you need and select Save As, save to a location on your device and change the background as needed for your OS.

For Mobile devices, most mobile phones require a long press and a menu popup will be displayed, click save then follow the steps for your operating system to set as your background image.

If anyone has problems or questions with their mobile device, let me know and I will try to assist.

http://www.timlesterimages.com/calendar/november.html

Enjoy the images this month and let me know if you have any questions and comments! If anyone would like a version of the aurora for their mobile phone background, send me a message and we can make that happen.

Tim Lester

TIM LESTER IMAGES
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