The Aurora Borealis, commonly known as the Northern Lights, roughly follows an eleven year solar activity cycle which peaked in 2024 by a visitation to some of the southernmost sightings of this heavenly wonder in recent history.
It’s difficult to put the sheer joy I had in seeing it for the first time into words other than I felt like a child getting the birthday present he’s wanted for so long, so it was somewhat intriguing that it appeared as far south for the second time on the 10th October, my daughter’s birthday. On the day the AuroraWatch App pinged a number of yellow alerts which told me that the phenomenon would be visible across many parts of the UK so, that evening, I checked for clear skies and prepared my camera in the hope that the alerts would spread countrywide, as predicted earlier that day.
My Sigma 10-20mm is a great lens but it isn’t designed for a full frame camera. Nonetheless, the crop ratio adjustment gives a maximum angle of 15mm on the D810, which is still an excellent width for shooting vast areas of the night sky. I set the ISO to 1600, put the camera into manual mode, dialled in a shutter speed of 15 seconds at an aperture of F4.0, mounted it on my tripod and settled in to watch a little TV for a change, as I waited for updates.
Eyes have two types of receptors; rods and cones, and it’s the low light sensitive rods that are used for night vision with colour sensitive cones active in daylight. I was aware that it takes about twenty minutes for our eyes to switch and that rods aren’t very sensitive to colour, so it stands to reason that when we look at the Aurora it’s nearly always less defined than the images we can capture in camera. It goes without saying then, that looking at a bright screen, even temporarily, isn’t what we should do if we want to see the lights with our naked eyes; a point that seems to be completely lost on many of the people subsequently out with their mobile phone cameras. Sure, I was looking at a bright screen in a darkened room but I knew that all I had to do is register a variation in the normal colour cast of the night sky to know that the northern lights had finally visited me at home, on top of the second highest hill in Sussex.
The light show appears because charged particles from solar flares are attracted to the magnetic poles of the Earth where they collide with gases in the upper atmosphere so, if we’re in the northern hemisphere they will always appear, as their Latin name Borealis indicates, to the north and if we’re in the southern hemisphere to the south, where they’re suitably called Aurora Australis.
The steps up to my roof terrace face north-north-east so I periodically lifted the hatch and peered out for a little while to see if I could see a faint glow of unfamiliar colour above the yellow light pollution from distant towns. I checked about three times that first hour with no success but when the App pinged red, just before nine o’clock, I could sense something quite different in the north-eastern sky. I decided to stand up on the roof for a few minutes where a faint, unfamiliar red glow became apparent. I describe it as red because that’s what my eye-brain system registered as my eyes were undergoing the switch between sensors, but “red” or “faint” isn’t what a camera sensor picks up, as my first shot powerfully evidenced. That frame also evidences that my brain and the D810 didn’t register that I’d fitted a non-full-frame lens either, but when I saw the 11mm image with the customary heavy vignetting from the lens barrel I could hardly contain myself. Half out of breath with excitement, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” was all I could mutter out to the heavens. Twenty minutes later I had shot dozens of frames and three or four sequences from east to west to east again, all of which displayed changing patterns of an overall magenta glow.
My apartment stands at a point where any air traffic from Gatwick’s southern Willow and Timba stacks converge before turning for a westerly approach over Tunbridge Wells so, apart from aircraft tracking across the sky in the upper airways, frames often picked up the various anti collision lights of aircraft in various directions as they established on their approach path, some adding positive detail to composition and some not.
Once post-processed, I considered that the large bagful of images I caught was really deserving of extra wide coverage, so I chose eight frames from which I stitched together a 180° east-to-north-to-west panorama. I hope you like the result!
If you've enjoyed reading this blog then please enjoy some of the images I caught under the 'Latest Images' from the Portfolio page and check out the other blogs from the the Blog page.
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Please spread links to others so they can also enjoy the site's content and I'd love to read your thoughts in the comments section below or via email from the Contact page.
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