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2025 began in great style with a G4 geomagnetic storm and SARS arc on New Year's Day followed by a sublime Venus-Moon conjunction then a week long cold spell which brought numerous snow showers and severe frosts. I spent three days on the hunt for Winter photo opps covering convective cells with snow curtains to frozen lakes, however it was January 9th which stood out as exceptional with freezing fog and -7C temps. We encountered beautiful hoar frost scenes in Omagh with trees covered in frost so thick it took on the appearance of snow. Frost covered everything and with blue skies and sunshine we obtained our finest images of the season. The chase converged on Gortin Glen Forest and lakes at sunset where I completed filming of Chronicles Of The Sperrins for the BBC which was a perfect end to the day. Two page report with 39 images and 1 video clip. - PAGE 1, PAGE 2.
Celestial Reprise - my 2024 sky highlights video showcasing various night sky and weather phenomena captured from Ireland and Northern Ireland during the course of the year. All content shot with a DJI Mavic 3 Classic, Canon 5D Mark IV and Canon 600D DSLR cameras, a combination of video footage and time lapse cinematography with a slide show at the end. This year was devoid of many storms, however the huge thunderstorm near Ballyronan during May was the stand out convective event with almost constant anvil thunder, the anvil itself looked like a mushroom cloud exploding in the sky.
The night sky however stole the show this year with several epic aurora displays, even the lesser displays were beautiful and very photogenic. The May 10th G5 was within the top three displays of my life, then the October 10th G4 beat that ranking as the second best display of my life and I've been observing aurora since 1998. These displays were remarkable, rare, severe, nights when dreams came true. Then the June 25th NLC display, that blew me away and caught me off guard during a season when expectations were low, especially during solar maximum. Well this display was supercharged by water droplets from the Hunga Tonga undersea volcano, as a result this NLC display was epic, type 5 brightness with vivid colours and sublime structures, I rank this as my personal best display along with the June 2009 display.
Then comet C/2023 A3 T-A, the brightest northern hemisphere comet in 27 years with a 20 degree naked eye dust tail with an almost full moon in the sky. These events make 2024 a remarkable year for celestial events. In addition to this I have included some nice sunset scenes, fog inversions, dramatic clouds and beautiful snowscapes. Overall it has been a very exciting and unusual year so I hope this video does it all justice. Some of these events will be appearing on a new BBC TV show called 'Chronicles of The Sperrins' due to air during 2025, with myself included, so do watch out for that. You can view the images and chase reports from these adventures on my website below... http://nightskyhunter.com/Storm%20Cha...Thanks very much for watching!
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Astronomy is not the only subject I'm interested in, check out my N. Ireland Storm Chasing section and view the chase reports and images which detail not only storms but other phenomena such as a moonbows, noctilucent clouds, aurora displays and exciting nature related photo shoots.
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Martin McKenna
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