Aurora Australis

While not as famous as its northern hemisphere cousin, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina actually get the "Southern Lights", the Aurora Australis. If you are wanting to see them regularly you need to visit Tasmania or the far south of New Zealand, as they are further south, but where I live does get them occasionally. I live in the far South West of Western Australia and on a clear night during winter you may see the lights moving over the horizon on the south coast.

I'm also lucky enough to live somewhere with pretty close to zero light pollution, so it is ideal conditions for photographing the milky way and night skies. Over our winter (June - August) you'll often find me out in the middle of the night taking photos around our region. I've managed to photograph the Aurora Australis quite a few times because of how often I'm out there.

I use the SpaceWeather app to find out when the aurora is active, I've got alerts set up on it, so it will wake me in the middle of the night if it reaches a certain threshold. The two main problems are that I'm fairly far north, so it needs to really quite strong and winter is our wet season, so it is often clouded over or raining when the aurora is active. It can be fairly cold, especially if the wind is coming from the south as there is nothing but ocean between me and Antarctica there.

I'm hoping one day to get to the northern hemisphere in winter to photograph the northern lights, I've only been during the middle of summer where it was daylight nearly the entire trip. I'll be posting up a couple of posts on my trip to Iceland as well as another post with quite a few of my night skies photos.

The colours in my photos are real and visible, but not as bright, I've used long exposures to capture as much light as possible, so the colours are a bit exaggerated. I don't adjust colour in my photos though, I adjust contrast and a few other bits and pieces, but if you are seeing the colour in my photo, the colour was there in real life... maybe not as defined though as our eyes do not see in long exposures.

Most of the photos above were photographed with my Canon 5Dmk3 or 5DS, they are all between 20 and 40 seconds long, f2.8-f4 and around ISO3200.

Thanks for checking out my photos!