Pursuit of the Aurora

Current Status

Solar rays	Earth's Field

Part 1: The Scene -The aurora and how to photograph it

Aurora Australis in it's crowing glory from Adair near Timaru, New Zealand, resulting from the most powerful X-ray flare observed from the Sun. It occurred on 4 Nov 2003 and was estimated to be X40-45. - Photo by Geoff Cloake

It 's not great... but is giving small opportunities

Auroras are related to activity on the surface of the sun. After a five year break (the quietest for century) the sunspots are firing up again and we can look forward to another of 5-6 year season of Auroras.

11 year solar sunspot cycle 24 prediction
Presented by the NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center

My first observation for five years - at last!

At last, after five years of patience, waiting for the solar minimum to end, I have observed a very distant aurora - probably 1000kms away! (Actually it was so weak I never saw it, just pointed the camera in sheer belief it was there) This 111 image animation shows how it performed during an hour of peak activity. Visit my Youtube channel here.

Not often but anytime

The South Island of New Zealand is in a box seat for observing the Southern Australis. While the polar regions have lively aural shows of swirling green ribbons and pulsations of light, stepping away a distance allows a far greater view. The vibrantly coloured rays reaching hundreds of kilometers into space become far more visible from face on.

The downside is that the Aurora reaches away for the poles less often and in TImaru we should only expect to see a phenomenal show once or twice a year - weather depending. Also the sun has been in its 'solar minimum' further reducing the schedule for the greatest show on earth.

Despite this I must have seen about 20 reasonable auroras during 2003-2005, giving me plenty of opportunity to understand them, learn to chase them and succeed with photographic techniques. There is also a big lesson in patience which a good "talking book" on a mp3 player helps.

I should also mention the perseverance and the need for warm clothing and hot coffee. It is the winter darkness with its chilly clear sky that offer the longest and clearest hours of observation.

What is it...

In simple terms the sun occasionally sends a burst of stuff our way and shakes up the earths magnetic field a bit more than usual. The field maintains a ring of light around the magnetic poles which can liven up and expand towards the equator during these shocks. If nearby we will see them a anything from ghostly glows over the horizon to billowing curtains of streaking gossamer.

An excellent full explanation is provided by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research here.

Easier to understand looking from space

Aurora Australis from space - taken by the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery in May 1991 - Credit: NASA

This amazing shot of the aurora from the space shuttle helped my concept of how an aurora is structured.

This one from the skylab is not bad either and shows how much the structure can differ depending on location and stage of activity.

This video clip from Astronaut Don Pettit is an animated sequence of still pictures and helps show the nature of an aurora in prgress. Video from NYTimes Dotearth blog.

Other Planets have them too!

Aurora can be seen on other planets and the Hubble Space Telescope(STIS) has captured these image of Jupiter and Saturn. Below the the aurora even interacts as bright dots with the Jovian moons.

Aurora Crowns Jupiter's North Pole - Credit: NASA/ESA, John Clarke (University of Michigan)

Saturn Aurora — January 24, 2004 - Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Clarke (Boston University), and Z. Levay (STScI)

The following BBC documentary on YouTube (Feb 2009) sums it up nicely. Dr Chris Lintott travels to a radar facility in northern Norway to discover how the magical Aurora Borealis are created.

Where and when should we look?

The Aurora normally occurs closer to the earth's magnetic poles, the further away we are the less often it will reach our way. When it does, it doesn't stay around too long adding to the reason why many people never see them.

Data from weather satellites allow scientist to project an artificial image of the radiation in an aural oval in progress - in this case a major event in the October/November 2003 period. The effect is similar in the Southern Hemisphere. People closest to the band are more likely to the brightest and more active shows.

The band expands varyingly during solar storms -shown in this 29 Oct 2003 series. As powerful events like this are less common, people further from the poles have less opportunity to see the aurora. (see TRACEfor more)

Also, the probability of seeing an aurora is greatly lessened as we need night time with a clear sky and little other light from the moon or street lights. From a photographic point of view this doesn't matter as the camera is not affected by bright light away beyond the view of the lens. In fact even looking through a tube will help observation, but any haze will still dull the effect. Also our eyes are not so sensitive to colour in low light and if the aurora is close enough the camera is bound to capture amazing colours.

How can we find it?

Simple - just improve our probability: know the best time to look, and go to areas less likely to have cloud and street lights..

First we need to appreciate what we are looking for and find some way of being notified when it is likely to be coming our way.

When I started to get interested I was absolutely ignorant of and asked Alan Gilmore of Mt John Observatory to give me a call whenever one could be viewed. With his help I soon got to see several great aurora.

I needed to have a better understanding to get the photos I desperately wanted. A quick search on the internet and I found SPACE WATCH and subscribed for Emails notifying of major solar flares and auroral activities.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) has made significant advances in quantitatively understanding certain space physics processes. Here is asample of a simulation they have created of the auroral ring form Polar UVI data.

If you are really interested you should get acquainted with them and also join the public forum to be in on all the speculation, and learn about the habits of aurora. To really get the full goings-on you can subscribe toSWIM and for an annual fee you can have all the monitoring information in the world (and beyond) on your own computer monitor. I find I get enough free information from various satellites and spacecraft. via a number of web sites including the SPACE ENVIRONMENT CENTRE andNASA

Now there some excellent tools for understanding what the aurora is. They would have saved me a lot of time had I found the at the begriming of my quest. Try this one by NASA's sun-earth connection forum and hosted by UC Berkeley. With its animated visualization and commentaries, II think it is excellent in showing up how it occurs and what observations are happening - right now!. Neat eh?

Track the Auroral Oval on Google Earth

Hopefully the best way to get an idea of the aurora potential in your location is to use this experimental space weather service from CCMCwhich provides overlays to various real-time simulations on Google Earth. This is new to me but would expect that when the "Auroral Boundary" comes within a couple hundred kilometres of your location you may have a chance of seeing an aurora within the next 10-30 minutes. CCMC say this service is being expanded and new elements will appear automatically. This is very encouraging!

The Setup

Preparing for the outings and the photography

Good auroras are rare at our latitudes so you can't risk missing out on getting good photos. I think it is critical to practice night sky photography beforehand, testing out your equipment and techniques. You gear will be tested to extremes and there is little room for error.

Low temperatures are likely and you need to know your camera, batteries and memory cards will work reliably. You need to be prepared for the cold too! Your camera will be operating at maxed out ISO and aperture settings demanding critical focus and some form of image noise reduction. Lens filters should not be used either as the extra glass can increase flare and distortion in any bright points. Worse frost may form on your lens and your breath can easily steam up your view finder with your excitement at that critical moment.

This AlaskaPhotoGraphics web site goes into much detail about photographing aurora. Todd Salot of AuroraHunter.com shows very good examples of Aurora compositions.

Find the best locations

You need to have your shooting locations sorted out in advance too. This means scouting for southward locations in the daylight and trialling photos from them at nighttime. Water foregrounds are most effective but sadly I have not found useful ones locally, so I am still searching for alternatives further afield. I am now prepared to drive considerable distances and my search for locations is ever widening.

There are now tons of aurora photos on the internet. To be unique, I am aiming to capture mine as entire scenes that reach the standard of my other landscape photographs. So I am now considering locations that offer 'landscape' foregrounds, to make my photos truly regional and offer greater interest to local people. It is well worth prospecting for sites during the daytime, checking access is good and that anyone living near is not going to disturbed by midnight visitors to their domain. We don't want the police turning up do we!

It is well worth revisiting at nighttime to check if any bright lights are likely to ruin your view or landscape composition. Equally they can be useful as reference points, and worth including. Make some trial exposures to check for 'pollution' from the lights - especially from obscured ones. They can throw up vast areas of scattered light, totally masking the aurora to the naked eye. Think about car lights too. I seem to forget about our infrequent trains, that seem to frequent my locations at the wrong time, drowning my photo with their very bright lights.

A compass is also very important to check where the Magnetic South Pole is to ensure the will generally occur in your selected scene. If using maps to guide your reconnaissance, remember the Magnetic South Pole is poles-apart from the Geographical South Pole moving 10-15kms each year.

View of Antarctica showing movement of the magnetic South Pole in relation to the Geographic (True) South Pole, which maps refer to. Auroras are more likely to be centred looking west of the South Pole by the angle of 'magnetic declination' which is currently 23-24 degrees where I live. For New Zealand locations you can check from the link on map.

Finally I like to know if I have cellular phone coverage: a. to let my wife know where I finally get to, b. to send out messages about the aurora, and c. gain internet access for my notebook computer and all these pages of informaton and links.

So while waiting for the next aurora, use the time to get yourself, your skills, places, ideas and gear ready.

Please continue to next page for:

Part 2: The Shot - Beginnings of a Solar Storm

More images and my stories about my photoshoots and pursuing the Aurora are here.

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