Tonight, under the twilight, the cobalt sky lit up with green highlights as the aurora exploded overhead. It all started a little before midnight, then I was out until 2am shooting the sky. Within minutes the bands were showing fantastic pinks and reds!
And all of this came before midnight! A little after 12 am the sky became mostly dark (although in a couple weeks that cobalt will be as dark as it gets). Of course, this means that this might be the last great show we really get until September.
Once darkness set in the display really began. I don't know where to start; I took 75 pictures that I am going to keep, so after today I'll probably just post a few a week to keep me occupied during the non-aurora summer. Oh, well we did get some strong 'moon dogs' for a while. That was cool and pretty unique:
The interplay between the aurora, clouds and moon was really cool, and since the aurora was also super bright it could really compete with all the other lights in the sky. It's motion was so fast I increased the ISO setting to a little over 1000 for many of the pictures and took 2 sec. exposures to grab some of the texture. This makes the images a little grainier, but still good. I have to say that as much as I am ready for the snow to melt, I'm really going to miss seeing the northern lights over the next couple of months. I can't describe how cool it is to see them so bright and fantastic; not to mention directly overhead. It was hard to crank the tripod back far enough last night.
In total, I was outside for about 2 hours just watching and taking pictures. It was truly a wonderful, wonderful time.
I've decided to dedicate a whole set on flickr just to tonight since there are so many images. I hope you enjoy these few for now. Thanks for visiting!
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