aurora australis

I have enjoyed viewing the Aurora Australis for the past few years but something I have never been able to do is photograph it. My camera has never been powerful enough to capture the spectral lights. Until this year.... Thanks in part to a new camera, but mainly thanks to installing CHDK (this program is amazing and has added so many capabilities to my standard P&S) on my new camera last night I was able to capture my first photograph of the aurora. I am very excited about this and look forward to tweaking my settings as the season progresses. It was also a pretty amazing aurora. I had been outside for about 30 minutes taking pictures of stars when my batteries died. I was about to head back inside when I noticed the faintest glimmer of an aurora starting to form. I ran inside, swapped out my batteries and went back outside. And waited. Sure enough the beginnings I had seen started to grow and grow and grow. Eventually a river of light was flooding it's way from horizon to horizon. It moved, it danced, it twinkled. It lit up the sky with an eerie green that I have come to love.

These were shot with a 62 sec exposure and at 100ISO.





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