More Northern Lights, Now With an Animated Image!

2015-01-03Uncategorized Standard

[Photos taken between 00:01 and 00:20 on 03 January 2015. Blogged shortly thereafter. As in, within the hour!]

Aurora photos started popping up on Facebook, so I decided to check conditions, and found a clear sky, and active lights bouncing here and there. Stayed out for about 20 minutes, or until my fingers were about to fall off. Gloves? Who needs gloves where there are green lights in the sky?!?! (5 images total)

These photos span three minutes of real time.

Meanwhile, on my right, there was a loooong streak, that just slid on by with out a fuss.

Meanwhile, on my right, there was a loooong streak, that just slid on by without much of a fuss.

Still meandering by.

Can you spot Orion?

I experimented with various settings, and have come to the conclusion that it’s a lot harder to work with images that are too dark, which is probably why almost all aurora images are rather overexposed. This image below, for example, looks about ‘right’ as in, that’s pretty much what it looked like in ‘real life’, but you can barely see the aurora, and there isn’t enough information in the image to crank it up.

Hidden aurora that came out to play only for a little bit.

COMMENTS

Rajan Parrikar 2015-01-05 at 01:43 -

Too much light pollution in Reykjavík. I remember a night of an unbelievable dance in the sky in the desert between Mývatn and Egilsstaðir, with the ripples sweeping across the heavens. That was a 4/5 years ago. I decided to stop photographing and simply watch the show. My hunch is that even 5 seconds at f2.8 that night would have resulted in some hot areas in the frame, that’s how intense it was. Northern Lights photos are now becoming clichéd.

Hrefna 2015-01-09 at 10:29 -

Yes, there’s a ton of light pollution, so we don’t see these all too often, but the lights put up a good show (by city standards) that night. I’ve never been one to hunt down lights to photograph them (these were right outside our house!), so I’m thinking that at most I might one day hike a little up the hill, where it’s a tiny bit darker, and see how things look from there.

I agree with you that aurora photos have gotten quite boring almost, because they’re all so similar. But your experience sounds like fun! 🙂