Despite a promising forecast for last night, the aurora did not burst to light in the intensity, I and other Alaska photographers and aurora watchers had hoped. I did venture out to make a few images of the subtly shifting lights. Unfortunately the low intensity required some long shutter speeds which allowed the colors to emerge but generally blurred the auroral “curtains” into an even haze of color.
The reddish color that dominates the images is likely light pollution from Fairbanks reflecting off particles of ice fog in the air. It wasn’t visible to the eye, but a 20 second camera exposure was more than enough to bring it out.
Here is a bit on my thought process for three images I made last night:
Top photo: This was made during a brief period when the lights brightened and slowed their shifting. This allowed a 20 sec exposure to be adequately bright and still retain at least some of curtains. I cropped the image in post processing to remove a large gap of empty sky at the top of the image and create a more panoramic perspective.
For this image, I zoomed my lens to 30mm to focus on a bright patch of aurora that was visible through the hillside trees. Throughout the portion of the display I photographed, the aurora lay low to the north which meant big wide-angle shots left a lot of empty sky. I resolved that somewhat in this image by zooming in a bit tighter.
Due to the above-mentioned low to the horizon display, I didn’t make many vertically composed images. This was an exception where I tried to emphasize the broad starry skies. Not sure it worked, and apparently I bumped the manual focus on the lens very slightly which caused some lens blur in the sky and trees. This image will likely find its way into my computer’s trash bin.
Someday (soon hopefully) I’ll get to that aurora photography tutorial I’ve been hinting at on Facebook and in a earlier post here. Apologies for the delay.