Photographing the Aurora in My Style

For longest time one item that has been on my photographic bucket list was to photograph in Aurora from Venus Bay. It’s been frustrating. I’ve managed to photograph the Aurora colours through cloud cover unconvincingly for a long time. The main problem is the difficult to predict when the Aurora will reach Victorian coast. So far I have found the Space Weather service provided by our Bureau of Meteorology is probably one of the best sources of near future aurora predictions. To be visible from the victorian coast the K-index must be 5 or more,

 https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Space_Weather

Last Monday and Tuesday were predicted to have an excellent chance of seeing and photographing the Aurora from coastal Victoria. I went out on Monday night but was not able to see any evidence of an Aurora. Things changed on Tuesday night, I ended up at Venus Bay Beach Qne along with quite a few other families, just in time to see Aurora Australis was developing first of all as a pale green arch/swipe across the horizon and then some purplish curtain of low light going vertically up into the sky. There were occasion white vertical flare adding to the curtain and often reaching a little higher. View with unassisted eyes the intensity was dullish and the colour washed out and more grey. It is well known that the current generation of mobile cameras captures more intense colours at night (especially the purple/pink hues). You just set the phone to night mode, and it seems to capture enhanced colours compared with what you actually see. This image is what I call my “cheat” image. And was taken with my Samsung phone.

I really wanted to photograph the Aurora with my regular camera, my beloved little Olympus , which has a live composite mode and an in-camera long exposure feature that only adds new light sources to a composite image, preventing overexposure and making night shooting easier by showing the effect live on the screen, unlike traditional long exposures which normally blank screen and  just stack all light. It works by taking multiple shots and compositing them, recording only changes in illumination above the ambient exposure  This makes it ideal for star tracking and extra long exposure without overexposing the image. The headlights of cars arriving at the car park were a bonus, occasionally "painting" light the grasses in from of my tripod, which gave a more interesting foreground. The image below was taken over a three minute period.

I believe the K-index number was around 7 to 8 at the time I took these