Aurora Borealis
As I’m sure the entire world knows by now, last night there was the biggest solar storm in decades. Unusually I heard about it before it happened and the skies were (mostly) clear here in Scotland, so for the first time in my life I got to see the aurora borealis!
Because I don’t have transport I was stuck looking at it from my light‐polluted garden, but it was absolutely visible, if not very colourful, and I managed to get some photos.
The photos were a huge surprise, they need very little post‐processing, mostly just pushing up the exposure (I should have looked at the histogram, but the photos looked great on the screen in the dark…), and messing a little with contrast and adding some saturation. I did do a wee bit more with some, but really it wasn’t very much. I didn’t have to push them very hard to get spectacular looking shots.
It all started fairly innocuously, with some bands of light above the flat.
It started to get a bit more active quite soon. This is probably the most ‘processed’ photo in this set. I used Capture One’s ‘Dehazer’ to try and remove some of the effects of light pollution, and I think it was quite succesful, but I’m not sure if it’s pushed up the saturation a bit too.
This was something I had not expected! Almost all photos of aurorae show them as walls or curtains of light, but here it looked as though it was emanating from a single point, just south of directly overhead.
This was looking north and looked more like the usual pictures of aurorae. You can see the clouds beginning to move in.
I could see there was a lot of action going on when I took this, but looking at the photo on the camera screen was a bit of a shock.
My camera settings were mostly ISO 400, f2.8 and 5 or 6 seconds. I started off with longer exposures and a lower ISO setting, but that just made everything look very smoothed out. I think I probably should have tried upping the ISO a bit more and using a slightly shorter exposure time, but then, as I said already, I had to push the exposure in post so I probably could have done with just increasing ISO more.
Well, I’m quite pleased with how these turned out.