A night of lights – Christmas and Aurora Borealis
Five weeks away from the blog feels like forever. It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing, it’s just that there’s been little worthy of writing about. There’s very little snow, and we’ve had fairly warm temperatures and lots of cloud, so no aurora…
The forecast last night was for a strong aurora display but cloudy skies. Before going to bed, though, I noticed that even though the weather report said that the sky was cloudy, it was in fact completely clear, so I decided to head out on an aurora hunt.
It’s easier on Cathy if I leave as she’s going to bed rather than a couple of hours later, which is often closer to the start of a Northern Lights display. I hadn’t shot the Christmas lights around Whitehorse in many years, and they’re particularly good this year, so that would be a good way to kill time. Just after 10:00 pm, I made my first stop to get this shot of the SS Klondike.
I spent about 15 minutes at the boat, shooting from both viewing levels as seen in the photos below, then went across the road to Rotary Park, which although nicely lighted, didn’t result in any photos I was particularly happy with.
Main Street, very quiet at 10:45, was the next stop.
The huge Christmas tree at the historic White Pass & Yukon Route railway depot seems particularly impressive this year.
I noticed this statue I hadn’t seen before beside the train station. I cropped out most of the half-built base, but when I was going through the photos this morning, it appears to be an important part of the piece, as it says “12 Days to End Violence Against Women 2015” – a short article about that program can be read on the CBC site here.
The decorations on City Hall are, as always, some of the nicest.
The next major stop was Shipyards Park. This is the view south along Front Street (formerly First Avenue) from the park.
The thickest grouping of Christmas lights at Shipyards is across the street from Tim’s.
At 11:20, an arc of aurora appeared, so I took a few final shots and drove a couple of miles to a new location overlooking the city.
The highest point on the Long Lake Road is one of my favourite shooting locations in the city. A slight widening of the road there allows for safe parking. This is the view to the south, over the Yukon River.
Looking north, the view of the aurora borealis was good for a few minutes, then it very quickly faded.
I took a few photos of the city, including Shipyards Park as seen in the next photo, then made the fairly long drive out to Lake Laberge.
I reached the Lake Laberge Campground just before 01:00. My hope had been that the aurora would return in a strong way, but that didn’t happen. The first photo was shot at ISO 1600 with a 30-second exposure, a sign of very weak lights.
A few minutes later I was able to drop the ISO to 800, but a 30-second exposure was still needed. This is a “selfie” – the light is from my headlamp.
The next photo is the same one as above, with some manipulation. The one above is what the scene actually looked like (very dark, with muted colours), while this one has been manipulated to look the way most people seem to like them to look.
This is the strongest the aurora got, right at 01:00.
The next photo is basically the same as the one above, but shot a few seconds later with the light balance set to Tungsten Light, 3200K. As with the above manipulation, most people seem to like to think that the aurora looks like this 🙂
I stayed at Lake Laberge for another couple of hours, but the aurora never returned, so at about 03:00 I started the drive home, and was in bed before 04:00. As I neared Whitehorse, a light snow began, and as I’m writing this just before noon, a light snow is again falling. Added to the thick hoar frost that was already on the trees, it’s really quite pretty.
Before signing off, I’d like to show you a bit more of what I’m up to. One of the big projects was posting 78 photos from a collection I bought a dozen years ago. The photos were shot and collected by a serviceman at Naval Air Station Kodiak in 1949-50. I’ve just begun the huge job of trying to caption as many of them as I can. You can see that album by clicking here. The photo below is of a B-17.
Another project that I’ve finished scanning and am now putting online is a guide to Yukon airports from 1988. The binder in the photo below was one I built as my primary resource when flying my Cessna. It had full airport information for all airports in BC, the Yukon, and parts of the NWT and Alberta, cut out of the “Canada Flight Supplement”, a government publication that was updated a few times each year. I’m taking those pages and adding Google Earth images and my photos of the airports – you can see those starting here
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