Landscape, Low Light, OM-1, Photography, Tasmania

Astounding Aurora

While the bioluminescence along Carlton Beach had disappeared, the sky above put on the most amazing show last night, the best aurora display I have ever witnessed.

Photographer friend and neighbor, Jim, watches on as the sky explodes.

“The sky wasn’t so much full of light, it was alive with it.
Wave after wave of it pulsed from horizon to the zenith.
Great wispy ribbons of it danced and swirled above our heads.
All around us it throbbed and arced, beating a magnetic rhythm that streamed from an explosion, a wind that travelled 150 million km in 8 minutes.
A coronal mass ejection, a storm of unfathomable proportions, bringing awe and wonder.
Here was energy writ large before us, charged particles, electrons, protons.
Collisions with oxygen and nitrogen, exciting their atoms into the light, blue, green, red and purple.
Words were lost on us.
Humbled, we stood we watched our vocabulary shrunk to ohhs and ahhs.
Around us the universe was breathing, we breathed with it, watching the show as it swirled around.
How lucky we were to have witnessed such a thing.
The greatest that we have ever seen.”
– penned by friend, Evan Boardman.

Breathtaking waves of light pulsed and danced overhead.

There was one point in the evening where I was overwhelmed, with light pulsing all around and overhead, I just lay on my back on the sand for a while, just soaking in what was happening around me. Living the now, without a screen in front of my face. The image below of me was taken by friend and neighbour Jenny on her phone.

Jenny’s husband, fellow Olympus photographer Jim took the image below of me, after lying in the sand, back on the camera, using his new OM3.

Below, post processing “fine art” – manually merged in Photoshop to indulge in – what could have been –
Bioluminescence image 20/1 @ 12.54am
and Aurora pic 20/1/ @ 10.35pm,
Carlton Beach, Tasmania. – Olympus OM1, Laowa 7.5mm lens.

Two images merged from both end of the same day!

Single still images simply do not to the evening justice, and I honestly don’t know which ones to pick to edit, so I uploaded a video of all in-camera jpegs taken of the evening, which will give you an idea of what it was like overall. It has been a long time since I did any video editing, but here goes …

Thanks for joining me for a rare treat, under the southern sky.

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TasView (Tone)

Tone Bacon - Tasmanian photographer. tasview.com

19 thoughts on “Astounding Aurora”

    1. Thanks Ed, this post was a collective effort and I still have a few pics I want to edit properly. I had to re-learn DaVinci Resolve, it’s been so long since I edited video … it took my way longer to make than it should have, lol.

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    1. Thanks John, I’ve seen the aurora quite a few times, several as a kid on my Dad’s boat down “The Channel”. But I have NEVER seen it explode like this, and for so long! It was an epic, mind blowing event. I should have worn my tin-foil hat!!! lol.

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    1. Thanks Anneli, I’ve seen the aurora quite a few times, several as a kid on my Dad’s boat down “The Channel”. But I have NEVER seen it explode like this, and for so long! It was an epic, mind blowing event. I should have worn my tin-foil hat!!! lol.

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