Steve made a spectacular appearance running east/west right above Ness Lake! While related to the aurora borealis (or Northen Lights) ‘Steve’ is a discrete optical phenomenon that was only formally discovered in 2017 by aurora watchers from Alberta. It was subsequently determined to be caused by a 25 km wide ribbon of hot gasses at an altitude of 300 km, temperature of 3000 °C and flowing at a speed of 6 km/s (compared to 10 m/s outside the ribbon). The name "Steve" was taken from Over the Hedge, an animated comedy movie of 2006, in which its characters chose that name for something unknown. "Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement" was suggested as a backronym of Steve which has since been adopted by the team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center studying Steve. The shot shows Steve on the right (light pink) with a picket fence aurora (green) on the left. There an unknown interaction with Steve that often causes the picket fence aurora along the side of it. Ness Lake, Northern British Columbia, Canada
Out searching for wild grizzlies in the Great Bear Rainforest. Amazing to see these guys swimming to catch and eat salmon. Once you see them up close you start to think that an 800mm lens might be a better alternative to physically halving the distance between the bear and your 400mm lens ! Shot late in the day in Tweedsmuir South Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada
Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights over the Crooked River . The shot is a long exposure on a particularly dark night and I was happy to capture my first high altitude blue/purple aurora. The blue/purple fringe on the top comes from the interaction of the solar wind with hydrogen and helium in the ionosphere. Below that is the band of red or blood aurora that forms around 250 – 500 km from high energy state excited oxygen atoms emitting light at 630 nm. The bottom layer is the more typically seen green aurora that forms between 100 – 250 km by excited oxygen atoms emitting light at 557.7 nano-metres. The green band in this shot here actually has a yellowish tinge as we are looking at the auroral oval from a long way away. This happens due to the shallow angle of observation causing the green and red bands to overlap generating a dirty green or yellow rather than the vivid green you see with overhead auroras. At the lower edge of the curtain (below 100km), the density of molecules doesn't permit oxygen to emit light. It is however possible to see a low altitude fringe of blue or red below the green oxygen layer that comes from Nitrogen atoms either in its ionised or excited states respectively. This is not present in this photo and is typically only seen at very high latitudes when standing under a powerful overhead aurora. The Crooked River sits at 54 degrees North in Northern British Columbia.
