A bit of aurora to whet my appetite
I haven’t been aurora-ing much yet this season, but need to get to work on it, because we’re nearing the solar maximum and it could be a very good season. Last night the forecast showed pretty much no chance of a show but it turned out to be quite good, for half an hour.
I was pounding away on my Atlin cemetery web pages last night when a notification from my Aurora Alert page popped up. I looked outside and decided it was worth getting my gear together for some possible shooting. It had faded a bit when I took the first shot at 10:28 – a 30-second exposure @ ISO 800.
Another a minute later. Though it had faded even more, I decided to go for a drive to a better spot in case Lady Aurora returned.
I got changed (I’ll shoot in my pyjamas at home but not on the road 🙂 ) and by the time I got to the car she had indeed returned. The next shot, still in my driveway, was shot at 10:48 – a 10-second exposure @ ISO 800. I just guess at exposures given the brightness of the aurora and almost always get it fairly close.
I’d been thinking in recent weeks I should head out into the former copper-mining area right behind me to shoot the aurora, and that’s where I went. At the first high spot, I shot the next photo at 10:57 – still 10 seconds @ ISO 800. The orangey light is the moon rising.
A minute later I shot the final image of the night, just to the left of the image above.
I drove back into the forest, headed for a large flooded mining pit that should give good reflections of the aurora from the south bank. But the show ended before I got there. I had zero confidence that it would return again so went home. That 30 minutes, though, was enough to give me the incentive I need to work harder to get out 🙂
Yesterday a woman from Ontario posted in my aurora group that allows photos (the Alert one doesn’t), promoting her new group. Because the photos aren’t from the Yukon, I declined the post. She tried again last night, and that got her both Declined and Banned. These images (loosely based on photos, perhaps) are so awful they hurt my head. The aurora borealis is one of Mother Nature’s most amazing, if ephemeral, creations – I simply don’t understand why people do this to it 🙁
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Looking forward to your natural aurora photos! I agree with you on the poster you noted… the few times I have seen them in AK over the years, they are just wonderful… Mother Nature is just grand…no need to push that hard in processing. (interesting effects, certainly, but not in your page.)