Well; it took a while but I finally got to see a naked eye aurora. I can say it was very bright and you would definitely notice it if you walked straight outside from the lights of your house. It was a silvery green glow but very faint on the colour. It was so bright it silhouetted the clouds in the foreground and you could easily see the reflection in the water.
These are a couple of stacks that I put together last night from a time lapse I took of the event. I will no doubt go over these again but for now I just want to show what it looked like at Sugars Beach. You can imagine the hoots coming from all those present.
So glad to see you captured the Aurora with clear skies.
Two cracka images you have. Did you get my Alert on the other site?
What camera and settings did you use?
Regards Paul.
HI Paul, no I just checked during the afternoon at around 4pm and saw it was at KP7, we were heading down to Clayton anyway, so I grabbed my camera and rang a few mates to see who was interested in going down. I dropped Cate off at Clayton, set up the run for the observatory and left that in park mode and then drove to Sugars (about 45km) and set up there.
The camera I used was a D4. I was ramping in from twilight to dark so started taking frames at 1 second and then slowly worked my way to 30 seconds. That takes about 40 minutes. ISO was 3200 at f2.8 with a 14-24mm. These shots were 13 seconds for the bright green shot and 20 seconds for the shot with mainly red. Later I got faint pink and violet curtains forming in the longer shots. I do wish it had been around the time that I was doing the 30 second images that this event had occurred. The shots would have been more spectacular, but I am happy all the same for getting the chance to see it happen.
I am putting together another time lapse and this segment will feature in that time lapse. I only have 40 or so seconds so far.
Nicely captured, Paul! Interesting how different it looks from further away. In Norway last year we were much closer to the pole and saw mostly green and little of the red that is at higher altitude.
