It does not matter how many times they appear in the sky. When the aurora ripple up through the heavens you simply stop and watch. I have spent many evenings over the past twenty-five years trying to capture the aurora and despite a few great pictures I have consistently failed to encapsulate the awe you feel looking up at the sky while the ribbons of green and yellow, pink and violet streak through the night.
Over the years, technology has changed. When I first started trying to take aurora pictures, I have to use an old Pentax K-1000, the very same camera my father bought me as a freshman in high school and which had traveled across the Gulf of Alaska through the Unimak Pass and on to the Pribilof Islands (but that’s for another post. I purchased a wired plunger that screwed into the button and allowed me to lock the aperture open for as long as I wanted. I spent many a cold night taking dozens of pictures at different exposures never knowing if any of them would turn out until after they had been developed.
Today, I can even grab snapshots of the aurora from my iphone. And as the video below will show, timelapse photography allows you to get a sense of the movement through the sky that a single still image does not. Unfortunately, at the present I do not have a camera capable of taking raw video of a live aurora, but maybe one day.
I have a gallery with some of my old aurora photographs here.
