Since I've been relatively immobile, I haven't been able to enjoy my normal photographic inspirations as much. But when the aurora forecast coincided with a few days of cloudless skies, I was inspired to stay up late and see what happened. As soon as it got dark I'd go outside an check the night sky looking for a glow over Deer Mountain. Finally about 10pm I thought something was starting to appear. A half hour later I walked out and looked up and saw spires of light emanating from behind Deer Mountain and extending directly overhead. I hobbled over to the car with all the speed of a slug being restricted by one of those drag racing parachutes and then raced toward what is normally an easily accessible northern sky view.
Everything seemed to be conspiring against me. To get to my photo spot I sneak around the caretaker's residence with my headlight off, onto the beach and around the corner. Usually not a big deal. Except that the landowners cut and fell a bunch of alder on the beach. No problem, just walk around them right? Not this time - high tide was preventing that. So instead I got to crawl over and through the alder. At night. Without the aid of a headlamp. Balancing on alder slash and dragging along my all but useless leg. It took me until 11:30pm to snap my first image. Then this feeble glow was all I was getting for the first 15 minutes of shooting.
To my delight the sky brightened with the aurora and started to throw some reds in the picture as well. I had to bust out the fish eye lens to attempt to capture it all. About this time I was wishing I could hike a mountain and get the high elevation view without obstructions - but this was pretty nice too.
Non-distorted version.
Decided to try my hand at a time-lapse video. The aurora cooperated, I'm going to have to start bringing two cameras when I do this. Processing this video inspired me to upgrade my computers memory (24 gb now) and set up a stand-alone SSD scratch disk just for rendering video.
After an hour and a half of time-lapse photography, I was getting antsy and wanted to compose some different shots. Just as important, the tide had gone out just enough for me to squeeze by the downed alder. This was the final shot at George Inlet for the evening.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Canon's 8-15mm fisheye lens, there is something I should explain. When you see the black vignetting in the corners, it means I'm maxing out the lens's field of view. The field of view from the vignette on one side of the photo to the vignette on the oppose side of the photo is 180 degrees. In short, the aurora was BIG.
Rotary Beach, with the swimming hole in the foreground. The moon was very bright but not quite full.
One of my favorites from the night's endeavors. The time of the photo is 2:23am.
Tide's dropping fast. The rock in the foreground is the same one surrounded by water in the two previous photos. 2:39am.
At this stage, I acknowledged that this was the best aurora I had seen in Southeast Alaska. I simply sat down and watched the show... with my shutter release in hand. At this point the sky was changing so rapidly and was so bright that I had to shoot in bulb mode and close the shutter when I felt that the image had been exposed.
This shot seems to have an eagle perched atop the aurora. Plus a meteor made a guest appearance.
180 degree field of view in all directions.
When I got home I decided I had to snap one last shot with the light show overhead. 3:30am. Sure do remember this night a lot better than I would have remembered any dream. Well worth the effort.
Beautiful Quentin! Thanks for posting and sharing such an amazing sight :-)
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