Aurora.

Friday evening I wandered outside with the dog and noticed the sky was very bright in the north. Alerted Louise and then faffed around sorting out a camera before venturing out. Usually the "merry dancers" as they are termed here are a bit of a disappointment but this time there was colour and movement visible to the naked eye. The new cable release came in handy and the pix are ok. However, I did learn that the sensor on that camera is mucky, hence various blue and red spots on the images. I'm guessing this is because I quite often change the lens on this camera body, whilst the other body has the 75-300mm lens attached pretty much permanently. The cleaning kit arrived today, I've just got to decide which is the most dust free room in the house.

All these images were taken just beside and behind the house. The camera exagerates the colours anyway but I've enhanced everything a wee bit with a tweak or two in PhotoscapeX. The second image here was on a long exposure, thus the stars appearing as lines.

And here are the last few beetles from my beetle outings. I really must get all of these organised in my Flickr collections.

An aleocharine I think. It was pretty small, around 3mm, but has fairly distinctive depressions in the pronotum, I ought to post it on FB as someone might recognise it.

Anotylus rugosus.

This is a common beast and pretty distinctive, a small thing though, 4mm.

Also at Marwick, on the beach, was this. I knew this was Omaliinae and I should have gone straight to Omalium with those obvious depressions in the pronotum but I went through the key instead and that took me straight down a rabbit hole. I did eventually come to my senses, I'd a memory of this genus and even this species from the last spring. The trouble with keys, they don't always use the most obvious characters first, annoying.

Omalium laeviusculum, a common seashore species.