Re: [APML]: Aurora Photographs

[Brian Halbrook <bhalbroo@mail.portup.com>]

The Astro-Photography Mailing List
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At 3:26 PM -0500 9/2/98, charles@jon.cjfny.org wrote:

>Last Wednesday night featured a spectacular auroral display from my site
>in Quebec. Just wondering what lenses and exposure times people use to
>photograph auroras?

Wide angle and "standard" lenses would obviously work best. Exposure time
is a crap shoot really... not all aurora displays are equal. If it's a fast
moving display and you want to capture curtains before they become too
"blended" obviously a shorter exposure shot wide open would be better,
maybe even under 10 seconds. Then maybe a film like PPF400 or PJM would be
best (just two examples, obviously a very wide range of films will work
with aurorae). If you can go longer, or the aurora is extremely bright or
relatively static in motion, then 100 speed film is even possible with
exposures up to a minute depending on the lens. The key is to bracket...
bracket, and then bracket some more. Use the apparent brightness of the
display to make some common sense decisions about what apertures/times you
might wish to exclude.

A relatively fast lens will obviously give you more bracketing options.

I prefer shooting slide film on aurora because trying to hit the right
color print on multicolored aurora can be tough. Sometimes you can't use
sky background as a clue because aurora can obviously shift that as well.
After getting a lot of yellow aurorae prints back from the lab... I decided
slides were the best way to go here.

>I was also wondering if there is any way to predict such events?

Of course you can go to a site here or there that will keep you up-to-date
on solar weather events and such... but that still isn't a guarantee that
you can walk out and expect to see aurora. The best way to get good aurora
shots is to just be out observing a lot and always be prepared with a
camera, tripod and film. And don't expect to see much around solar minima
;-).

So I guess the real key to getting some winner aurora shots is to just get
out and shoot as many of them as you can. You'll be amazed as to how well a
lot of them will turn out.

Good Luck.

Brian Halbrook                  <mailto:bhalbroo@portup.com>