2015/02 Yukon trip - Northern Lights |
||||||||
Christiane is a very good cook and she and her young helper Melly served up three course dinners and large and varied breakfasts. We had never eaten Arctic char before, a pink freshwater fish related to salmon. The dining room has big north-facing windows, an ideal place to spot the Northern Lights. The best views would be from outside, usually long after dinner, but the lights had once showed up during the meal, and I’ve included Jean Marc’s amazing picture from that night.
Jean Marc came over after dinner from their nearby home to give me some tips on how to photograph the aurora. Some of it I knew already but this guy had actually published his own book of pictures so he had some excellent practical experience related to electronic noise with long exposure times. One surprise was that the camera is more sensitive than the human eye in detecting the aurora, so it’s worth taking speculative pictures to see if the aurora is starting.
 |
Aurora |
|---|
The weather was favourable, a starry and clear night. Around 11 there were some flickers, so I was out there in the snow with camera and tripod; it was cold, about -20C or 
-4F, with a stiff breeze. Andrew and Cassie were out on the deck.
Sandie preferred to watch from inside, but she helped by getting me dressed for the outside. With a stiff back and fingers I had trouble with boots and leggings but she has a lot of experience with getting toddlers ready to play in the snow!
Nothing developed for an hour but then there were green shimmers on either side of us and then a sudden arch right across the sky. It was impossible to capture it all as 
even my widest lens can’t cover the whole sky. The whole arch was shimmering and moving, so stitching pictures together didn’t work well either.
We’d have been happy with that display, much more impressive than the lights we’d seen ever before, but then about 12.30am the whole northern sky lit up, an amazing sight. The pictures show the scope of the effect but they are more “solid” than the reality; they don’t capture the 3D effect or the motion.
The arches in the background were stable but the vertical lines were more like candle flames writhing in the breeze. Easy to understand how people came to believe in fire sprites. The show went on for a quarter hour and then slowly dwindled to a single giant flame in the sky. By one it was all over though we stayed up for another hour just in case.