Aurora – finally...

I've lost count of the number of near-misses I've had when it comes to the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, despite the fact we live on the doorstep of a recognised "Dark Skies" region, where light pollution is very low.

Over the years, every now and then my Facebook and Instagram feeds have become plastered with images that local people took on their phones the night before, while I was completely oblivious,  watching Netflix or sleeping.

Other times there have been much heralded expectations but cloud cover in this region has scuppered any possibility of seeing them.

While Scotland is at the Northern end of Europe, here in Dumfries and Galloway, we're still the best part of a thousand miles south of the Arctic Circle, so the aurora is pretty rare and precious.

However, last night, around 11pm, I saw a friend had posted an aurora photo from their phone onto FB about an hour earlier.

I quickly clicked over to an online aurora tracker - https://veryweather.co.uk/auroraTracker20.html – and it looked like there was some activity, but I wasn't sure how much it was covering this region.

Next thing I did was go to the back window. The rear of our house faces Northwest, and if I angle my phone to face north, there's just enough gap between the edge of the window and a tree in next door's garden to get a glimpse of the horizon at the edge of town.

Although I couldn't see anything with the naked eye, a 3 second exposure on the phone made me think this was hopeful.

View from the back window on my phone

It's probably worth mentioning at this point, for those who have never seen the aurora, but have seen their friends posting their colourful phone pics - the chances are that what they were seeing with their own eyes was more like the desaturated images shown further down this blog post, and not the full colour displayed in their photos. 

We have 2 different light receptors in our eyes - rods and cones. The rods deal with light and dark while the cones process colour. But the rods detect light at fainter levels than the cones - which is why our night vision appears to be in black and white. Unless you are under extremely powerful aurora, you are unlikely to detect much colour, if any. However, the longer exposures possible with the camera, allow the colours to come through.

Back to the story...

Feeling hopeful, I grabbed the camera and tripod and headed out to Loch Ken, a few miles up the road from where I live.

Years ago, when I first had a go at a bit of night-time photography, I quickly discovered that just pointing your camera at the sky might show a few white dots on a black background, but with no context, the images tend to be pretty boring.

Fine if you have a telescope attached to your camera and are picking out the Orion Nebula, but for the rest of us with ordinary lenses, the best way is to improve our photos is to incorporate the features of the landscape.

Silhouetted trees, buildings or mountains against a starry backdrop can look pretty cool, but one of the best tricks is to use water and reflections.

From previous failed aurora hunts, I had at least realised that there were a couple of potential places along the shore of Loch Ken, where it might be possible to shoot up the length of the lake, which points more or less north, and so get reflections if the water was calm enough.

To my absolute delight, there was no wind, and the loch was almost millpond smooth. And because the temperature had dropped to about 2 degrees Celsius, there were no midges! 

Frozen fingers and toes I could cope with, but not the swarms of misery-inducing biting creatures that would have been there if it had just been a few nights ago when we had a couple of warm (by Scottish standards) evenings.

I clambered down the embankment to a small patch of sandy pebbles that jutted out a few metres into the loch and set up the camera on the tripod.

At this point, all I could see was a very faint light patch on the horizon, but when I took a 15 second exposure photo, sure enough the familiar greens and purples could be made out.

What it looked like to me

What it looked like in the camera.

I shot off several photos, playing with the settings and angles until I thought I probably had the best images I was likely to get.

At one point I decided to see if I could photograph myself taking a photo of the aurora with my phone, so set a 10 second timer and ran round in front of the camera.

Image of me using my phone to photograph the aurora

What the phone photo actually looked like

It should be said at this point, if ever I doubted why my proper camera was any better than just using my phone, then this thoroughly answered the question.

I was just beginning to think maybe my extremities were just a bit too cold and I really ought to head home to a nice warm bed, when I thought the sky was looking brighter.

I fired off some more shots and saw a magenta layer had entered the scene, and there were spears of light textured into the colours.

Over the next 15 minutes or so, the light show in the camera was incredible, but even to the naked eye, it was the most impressive I had ever seen it. Although I still couldn't make out any real colour, the light and patterns were much brighter and clearer.

What I was actually seeing - no colour, but bright enough to see the show

Standing there, at the edge of the loch in almost complete silence, with the Northern Lights and the stars bouncing reflections off the glassy smooth water, felt truly magical. It seemed worth enduring the cold a bit longer to absorb the experience.

Eventually though I realised I lost all sensation in my toes and had very little left in my fingers, so had to pack up and come home.

By this time it was after 2am, so I had to leave downloading the images until today, and I had a small nagging fear that they might not be in focus.

Auto-focus rarely works in the dark, as the camera struggles to latch on to anything, so you generally have to do it manually, and that can be a bit risky when you can't really see much either. And it's happened in the past where I thought everything looked fine in the back of the camera, but once I'd got the images home and transferred to the computer, I'd gut-wrenchingly discovered the focal point had been out

However, looking through them today I am beyond elated.

Of course there are way better photos out there of incredible patterns lighting up the Norwegian Fjords in the snow, but I'm a people photographer and neither landscape nor astrophotography are my speciality.

For me, then, these are the most exciting aurora photos I've ever taken, and I've been feeling a little smug all day.