Off-topic - photos of the Aurora Australis from the Snowy Mountains

Hi,

As some people know, after taking a redundancy in 2016, I am retraining to teach Humanities and Science at High School after nearly 27 years as a lawyer in government. I have also established a photographic business teaching night sky photography. I love the gold fields and hope to make my first visit in July this year - It is hard to get down there with all that is on!

Anyway got these these captures of the AA near Cooma on 20/4. Take advantage of those dark skies when camping out in the hope of finding a nugget or two! You never know what treasure there is in the skies!

Best wishes

Ian

G'day Ian,

Great pics there and hope you have some good luck in July. Thanks for sharing your great pics as well.

Cheers.

Mike.

Congratulations! Those are two very nicely composed and exposed images. The Aurora ought to be visible from the Blue Mountains in Sydney (from the right location) and the Southern Highlands if it's visible from the Snowy. It was visible from Sydney back around 2001 when we had some amazing solar activity here at the time and the local Astronomy groups spent two nights in the Blue Mountains capturing it with crude early-generation digital cameras. I flew to Canada at the time to get married and we saw the most spectacular Aurora there on Christmas eve and again the night before we got married. It's an amazing sight to be underneath it when it's peaking.

excellent photos...thank you.

I live in southern California so there is no chance to see the Northern lights...definitely not the southern lights...but I would love to see one or the other.
Is there a simple reason why there is no streaking of the starts from the exposure? Unless the newer cameras can take a very fast exposure...

fred

fredmason wrote:excellent photos...thank you.

I live in southern California so there is no chance to see the Northern lights...definitely not the southern lights...but I would love to see one or the other.
Is there a simple reason why there is no streaking of the starts from the exposure?  Unless the newer cameras can take a very fast exposure...

fred

Hi Fred, there is a rule in photography called the "500 rule" that applies to taking photos of stars. What it means if you divide the focal length of your lens (eg say a 20mm lens) into 500 you will get the umber of seconds you can expose it before the stars start to trail. Therefore with a 20 mm lens you can expose up to 25 seconds without any apparent trailing.

In this case the shots were exposed fr about 15 seconds at ISO 800 at 24 mm which was enough to stop stars trailing. I use lens which are fast ie f2.8 and f1.8 fo my astrophotography to maximize the amount of light recorded during the time. The ISO simply i an indicaion of amplification not sensitivity as commonly thought.

I am lucky enough to have seen the Aurora Borealis from Alaska a number of years ago and hope to again when I visit Iceland in November this year.

All the best,

Ian