Aurora …

While I’ve been living in the tropics the sun has had periods of stormy weather, space weather that is. A son who lives in Melbourne has developed a bit of a passion for photographing the Aurora. They never reach as far as Broome and I will confess to a little jealousy.

You need a few things to get a decent aurora photo. The sun needs to get excited, the weather has to let you see the sky, the sky needs to be dark, the moon has to be not too full, a decent composition and a lot of luck. From the south coast of Oz you do at least know which way to point the camera – south. High ISO, longish exposure, wide angle and on a tripod.

My son follows the aurora forecast closely. For a few days now he has been urging me to get out there after dark but the sky has been clouded and Port Fairy has seen a fair bit of rain. Last night we won the lottery. His vantage point was across Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne. Mine was Griffiths Island, Port Fairy. My first composition included the light house and you can see the aurora if you know what to look for! I was on the phone to my son. He was describing a better developed event and encouraging me to get a good view of the horizon. So I scrambled precariously across the rocks and hunted for more compositions as the event increased in intensity. Please click on the first picture to see them at their best.

The aurora looks better on the camera than to the naked eye. It’s all about the rods and cones. Rods make up about 95% of the photoreceptors in the retina. They do the heavy lifting in low light and see in black and white. The cones come in three flavours (usually) and give us red, green and blue. The aurora is faint and in colour. The camera sensor is all cones (figuratively speaking) and shows us what is really there.