Last aurora night of the season?
I was quite excited about the opportunity to photograph the latest aurora I’ve ever seen on Thursday night. Although the weather forecast when I went to bed at 8:00 pm indicated that I might have to do some searching for clear skies, the aurora forecast for strong (level 4) displays would make it worth putting some miles on.
When I woke up at 11:00, the skies were mostly clear, much better than forecast. With high hopes that the aurora would be strong enough to be seen over the city lights, I started the night off just before midnight at my favourite overlook on the Long Lake Road. No luck, though – the aurora was much too faint for this to work.
Obviously darkness was needed, so I headed down the Alaska Highway to my most common shooting location, the Yukon River Bridge. I stopped for a few minutes at Macrae, though, and got a few shots of the aurora over the Alaska Highway.
By 01:00 I was up on the ridge above the bridge, hoping that good displays would appear. Clouds began to move in from the south through, and a friend in Whitehorse posted on the Yukon Aurora Alert page that clouds were also moving in from the west-northwest.
It take a lot of patience to get vehicles on even the busiest highway in the Yukon at night 🙂
As the clouds got thick enough that I was about to give up, a strong display arrived and lasted for a few minutes. When it faded, I packed up and started west on the highway to what I hoped would be clearer skies.
Less than a kilometer down the road, I did a U-turn as another strong show started. I took this opportunity to shoot some images to showing how to manipulate aurora photos. I don’t like “Photoshopped” aurora photos, but the’ve very popular. A camera setting isn’t exactly Photoshopping, but the concept is the same – you’re just manipulating the image before shooting instead of after.
The aurora went flat after that, and although I did find clear skies, no display that was really worth photographing appeared. The displays turned to the vaporous, extremely fast-moving ones that we see occasionally. Although interesting, they make for very poor photos. This final image was shot at ISO 5000 with an 8-second exposure in an attempt to show you what they look like.
I had a nap for an hour before starting the drive home. I was back in bed at 05:30. It was a good night but not a great night, and I had high hopes for Friday night, with another level 4 aurora forecast.
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