Having a lifelong wonder and relationship with the ocean environment, I was very interested to invest in a lens that can maximize the sheer amount of 360º beauty that occurs there.
The OM System M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO swallows up nearly a 180º hemisphere of its surroundings, and smoothly feeds it to the lite and mighty M4/3 sensor of my Olympus/OM System OM-1. That is not quite 360º, but it sure does make for some beautiful new captures and recordings.
I had been awake since 6:30am for a full day of late spring sunshine, when the word began to get around that we’d better stay awake well into the night!
The Northern Hemisphere was blessed by a G5(+?) heliostorm peaking early on the night of May 10, 2024. This was reportedly the strongest geomagnetic storm in at least twenty years, and it just so happened to occur on a beautiful clear night, with no wind, and a thin crescent moon setting to the northwest.
It was likely impossible to do this justice with any camera in existence, but millions of us did very well with even just a mobile phone, or even webcams.
The fisheye lens however left me stunned–it allowed the imaging of the massive auroras from the shimmering horizon all the way up to the apex of their pulsating arrivals overhead.
After some wonderful results using the Starry Night Autofocus feature, 1- to 4-second exposures, and some live composites, I decided it was time to devote 100% of my attention to the event itself, and left the camera aimed up on the tripod recording up to 900 exposures at a time via the Sequential Shooting mode.
As the storm took a rest, I did not, proceeding to make batch adjustments to raw ORFs using Darktable and darktable-cli, and letting ffmpeg rip on my m2. It was the first time I hit near “1000%” CPU usage for any duration of time, and a momentous occasion to do so.
By ~3:30am I had completed my uploads and stepped out one more time to witness the hyperfast solar winds buffeting the upper atmosphere, moving at speeds and scales so uniquely different that the mind bloomed with feelings of hyperrealism and higher consciousness. And how lucky are we that our precious atmosphere is not only so beautiful, but also protected us from near lethal doses of radiation? The faint dawn glowed on the horizon, another lucky day being born on the best planet around.