Verdant Skies over Winter Fields
The early prominences of a strong auroral display light up the dark winter skies above a stark volcanic and snow dusted landscape near Hornafjordur, Iceland.
After shooting until after the last light of blue hour at Vestrahorn, we headed into Hofn for a delicious dinner of langoustines and other local Icelandic specialties. The skies were mostly clear and the aurora forecast for later in the evening looked very promising so we watched our phones almost obsessively for alerts that activity could be beginning just outside. We were just finishing our meals when the Met Office's aurora page showed the activity level jumping up to Kp5, and then Kp6, which we understood loosely to indicate that something of a geomagnetic storm was beginning!
We hastily paid our bill and rushed out into the street, elated immediately to see shimmering veils of light dancing across the heavens above the village rooftops. At this first glimpse, the light color was still mostly white with only hints of green visible to naked eyes. We jumped in the car and drove out of town a few kilometers, watching the aurora seeming to increase in strength with each passing minute. More color (richer yellow-greens and touches of red) became plainly visible, and not knowing how long the display would last, we decided just to pull off the road at a random location where we could see some texture in the adjacent field leading toward more distant mountains crowned with whirling auroras.
While I had been fortunate enough to experience an auroral display before, I had almost no useful experience trying to photograph this wondrous phenomenon, so there was more than a little trial and error as I tried to focus and hone in on settings that worked reasonably well even as the strength, structure and location of the main display rapidly evolved. An additional variable was soon introduced when another car pulled off across the road a short distance from us, and left its tail lights shining enough to light some of the snow in the foreground of my composition here. I thought about removing that aberrant foreground light from this image, but given that there were some red hues in the aurora, I sort of came to appreciate the balance provided by the touches of reddish light hitting the ridges in that snowy field.
It turned out that nature had much more in store for us this evening than a quick, roadside view of the aurora. I've already posted a couple of images from later that same night when the aurora was even stronger, and its form even more amazing, but I felt like posting this as sort of a prequel, or origin story, before I get back around to posting some more of my later images (from different locations) of this stunning night-long celestial display.
Thanks for viewing!
Verdant Skies over Winter Fields
The early prominences of a strong auroral display light up the dark winter skies above a stark volcanic and snow dusted landscape near Hornafjordur, Iceland.
After shooting until after the last light of blue hour at Vestrahorn, we headed into Hofn for a delicious dinner of langoustines and other local Icelandic specialties. The skies were mostly clear and the aurora forecast for later in the evening looked very promising so we watched our phones almost obsessively for alerts that activity could be beginning just outside. We were just finishing our meals when the Met Office's aurora page showed the activity level jumping up to Kp5, and then Kp6, which we understood loosely to indicate that something of a geomagnetic storm was beginning!
We hastily paid our bill and rushed out into the street, elated immediately to see shimmering veils of light dancing across the heavens above the village rooftops. At this first glimpse, the light color was still mostly white with only hints of green visible to naked eyes. We jumped in the car and drove out of town a few kilometers, watching the aurora seeming to increase in strength with each passing minute. More color (richer yellow-greens and touches of red) became plainly visible, and not knowing how long the display would last, we decided just to pull off the road at a random location where we could see some texture in the adjacent field leading toward more distant mountains crowned with whirling auroras.
While I had been fortunate enough to experience an auroral display before, I had almost no useful experience trying to photograph this wondrous phenomenon, so there was more than a little trial and error as I tried to focus and hone in on settings that worked reasonably well even as the strength, structure and location of the main display rapidly evolved. An additional variable was soon introduced when another car pulled off across the road a short distance from us, and left its tail lights shining enough to light some of the snow in the foreground of my composition here. I thought about removing that aberrant foreground light from this image, but given that there were some red hues in the aurora, I sort of came to appreciate the balance provided by the touches of reddish light hitting the ridges in that snowy field.
It turned out that nature had much more in store for us this evening than a quick, roadside view of the aurora. I've already posted a couple of images from later that same night when the aurora was even stronger, and its form even more amazing, but I felt like posting this as sort of a prequel, or origin story, before I get back around to posting some more of my later images (from different locations) of this stunning night-long celestial display.
Thanks for viewing!