Northern lights

well, I've been here a month now and on Saturday night we finally saw some good Aurora. I'm going to assume in this case that a picture says a thousand words, and just show you the Pictures I took. For anyone interested they are long exposures (mostly 10 seconds) at 10mm (16mm equivalent) f/3.5, ISO 800.

I think this is my favourite (I have 84 to choose from from Saturday, so its hard to be sure!) Barrack 9 is on the right with Hotel 102 on the left and the ghostly figure of Colin standing centrally watching the display.

This one is looking past barrack 9 to barrack 13 in the distance, I love the twisty structure visible in the arc just before the mountain side.

This is looking across the road from barrack 9 to barrack 4, by now you can see that the Aurora really did fill the sky the other night.

As a Physicist, I like this one because there is evidence of vertical stripes in the arc which represent the geomagnetic field lines the charged particles are following.

Looking Southward at Barrack 9 and 4 shows how impressive the display was.

After a while we trekked up past barracks 11 and 13 (the Longyearbreen and Larsbreen glaciers are in the far in the background) this is another contender for my favourite shot!

And finally (just to show I don't just shoot landscape) the Auroral arc over the western side of the valley behind barrack 4.

Finally I can justify the cost and transport of my tripod, the shots would not have been possible otherwise, with shutter speeds this long, handholding is not an option and any shorter shutter speeds are too dark to show any of the structure.

I guess, given I have posted so recently (I couldn't wait to put these pictures up) I haven't got much else to say. The temperatures are finally starting to fall again, perhaps by as much as 10 degrees today alone, which means we'll probably be around minus 20 this week. Having said that, the wind is really picking up so its going to feel alot colder! Its also snowing alot here. I went with Dayle on his snow scooter up to Longyearbreen glacier yesterday in an attempt to find the elusive snow cave, but the visibility was bad (due to snow) and we decided that straying off the scooter track would not be a good idea.

other than that, nothing to report, but I here there is an Earth directed coronal hole, So I'll keep a look out for more Aurora, but it seems that, due to the snow, we're not going to have many clear nights for a while. I've seen green Aurora, now I want to see red ones!

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I did!

Ash