St. Patrick’s Day Aurora

St. Patrick’s Day Aurora

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This was my first attempt at photographing the aurora borealis.  I was initially unhappy with the results, as I shot most of the images with a fairly high aperture, and long exposure length.  Oh well, you got to start somewhere!

Images were shot northwest of London Ontario, near the small town of Ailsa Craig. It was a cool night, excellent and clear conditions, but not so cold that I couldn’t remain out for quite a period of time.

This first image is taken with the Bower 35mm lens (basically a Samyang).  This is a manual lens, and I was shooting at least f6.3 or maybe f8.

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The show was starting!  I then switched over to the wide-angle 14 mm Samyang.  I stayed with this lens for the rest of the shoot. First image shows the green arc that was prominent:

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This is a fairly dark location ,which I had scouted out using online dark skies maps.  The small light don’t you see near the center of the image is Zürich, Ontario.

This image captures the right edge of the arc, and it looks like possibly two Iridium flares!

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After about 45 min. to an hour, pillars started to appear:

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And became quite pronounced!IMG_1625web crop

Along with curtains.

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This was probably the peak of the activity:

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And at times, the display became quite complex:

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Some of the images had jet streaks, which I do not mind! Here is one example:

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As you can see,  snow was still on the ground! But it did not make from unpleasant conditions, and I am now very pleased with this event, and look forward to more Aurora hunting in the future!


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