Posted March 31st, 2018

Heaven Revealed

I haven’t done much northern lights photography this winter. In part that is because it has been quite a nasty winter with a lot of cloud, snow and deep cold. But even when the sky has been clear, I have not seen any impressive displays comparable to ones that had been common in recent years. It seems we are well into the down side of the sunspot cycle. SpaceWeather.com reports that sunspots were present almost continuously from 2011 through 2015, then 9% of the days in 2016 were spotless, 28% in 2017 and 57% in 2018 to date. Anyway, I was anxious to get out with my camera one recent night when the aurora forecast was promising, the sky was clear and the temperature was moderate. I watched from my home through the evening while the sky to the north occasionally got quite bright, but the lights were diffuse or formed weak bands that were not very interesting. Finally they erupted into the nice curtains I had been waiting for. My gear was at the ready, but in the few minutes it took me to get dressed for the cold and get out the door ... they were gone. Well, now that I was out there, I decided to carry on to a better vantage point and hope for an encore. The lights did return for a bit, but weakly and once again they were diffuse, like a luminous haze with no apparent structure. However, sometimes the digital camera can reveal things in the murk that are invisible to the naked eye. Yeah! I set my ISO to 6400, the highest I have ever tried for aurora photography, exposed for 10 seconds, and was rewarded with this pleasant surprise. I would not have been able to make this image using my older Pentax K-5 with an APS-C sensor, which for night skies is pushing the limit of acceptable image quality by ISO 1600; that would have necessitated a 40 second exposure, which likely would have blurred away most of the structure in the aurora. This is why I bought the full frame K-1.
Pentax K-1, Bower 14mm f/2.8 ED AS IF UMC, 10 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 6400