Aurora in the UK
15s / f4.0 / ISO800 (Canon RF 14-35mm)
Friday evening saw the biggest solar storms and thus the strongest displays of the northern lights in some 20 years and for once I found myself in a position to photograph it… but only just.
I have (or rather had) never photographed or even seen the aurora borealis in the UK before. I am fortunate to have photographed it many times in Iceland during the winter when green and pink dancing lights have filled the clear, dark Icelandic skies and so, without wanting to sound like an aurora snob, I have never thought it was worth driving two hours to the North Norfolk coast and staying up half the night just for the chance of seeing a distant band of colour low on the horizon. In short, I never thought it could be as good here as I’ve seen in Iceland. Recently though that has changed. The aurora follows an 11 year solar cycle and we are approaching the solar maximum (heaven for aurora lovers) heralding a few years of high activity. In the last year or so there have been sightings of the aurora as far south as Dorset and displays big enough to be worth getting out of bed for (or should that be not going to bed for?). Perhaps it is karma but since my interest in photographing the aurora locally in East Anglia has been piqued, I’ve constantly been frustrated by cloudy skies or lack of opportunity to get out.
4s / f2.8 / ISO1600 (Canon RF 16mm)
15s / f4.0 / ISO800 (Canon RF 14-35mm)
5s / f4.0 / ISO2500 (Canon RF 14-35mm)
On Friday evening though I did have the time and with all sorts of crazy levels of aurora forecast for the following days I started checking the weather forecasts and planning my nights of photography. Problem is, most of those forecasts were showing cloud for Friday night so I decided to go out on Saturday night instead. I even got as far as going to bed but as my phone kept pinging with aurora alerts the fear of missing out kicked in and I decided to head out. At the end of the day I’d never seen aurora predictions this high before and all I had to lose was a few hours sleep.
Luckily I already had a location in mind. I had earmarked the ruins of Bawsey Church near Kings Lynn in Norfolk for a night shoot some time ago. There are views in all directions so it should be possible to photograph the Milky Way to the south or the aurora to the north and despite the proximity to Kings Lynn, there’s little light pollution. In fact, I was there on Thursday night to photograph the Milky Way (it was too cloudy in the end but I did manage to get a star trail shot instead). The 90 minute drive up to Norfolk was mostly spent with the nagging fear that I would be too late and miss all the action and my mind raced to come up with alternative locations en route. My only reservation for shooting the northern lights at Bawsey Church was that the ruins are atop a slope so you are looking upwards which means if the northern lights are low in the sky they wouldn’t be visible. I almost laughed out loud at that idea when I eventually arrived to see huge curtains of lights shimmering across the sky, fanning out from directly overhead!
The aurora was clearly visible to the naked eye and it was even possible to detect some colour but when I saw what the camera picked up I could believe it, I’d never seen such a range of colours before and the next hour or so flew by as I did my best to capture the changing skies.
3.2s / f1.4 / ISO800 (Samyang 24mm)
3.2s / f1.4 / ISO800 (Samyang 24mm)
For those of you who are interested in the technical stuff. The camera settings for photographing the aurora are a bit of a balancing act. Shooting in the dark, you need to get as much light in as possible so start by setting the aperture to the lens’ maximum (ideally f2.8 or even larger). Next set the shutter speed to between 5-15 seconds and use the ISO to adjust the exposure. Choosing the shutter speed is the most important part, the temptation is to use a slow shutter speed to let in plenty of light enabling you to keep the ISO as low as possible for the best image quality but if the aurora is moving the shape can be lost resulting in blobs of colour. I usually start at around 10 seconds and speed it up until I’m happy with the level of detail. Don’t be afraid to use a high ISO of 3200 or more if necessary, modern cameras deal with noise very well but it is important not to underexpose - noise becomes more apparent when you brighten a high ISO image. Manually focus to infinity, I prefer to focus on a bright star rather than rely on the accuracy of the lenses infinity mark.
You don’t need much specialist gear but a fast, wide lens is very useful. I have a few lenses that I use for landscape astro photography and on this evening I had the time to try all four of them. My go to lens is the tiny Canon RF 16mm f2.8 and it performed admirably as always but the height of the aurora meant I wanted to be as wide as possible so I switched to the Canon RF 14-35mm. It has a slower f4 maximum aperture which meant I had to double the ISO compared to an f2.8 lens but the brightness of the aurora meant that it wasn’t crazily high. I do have a Samyang 14mm f2.8 which (unlike the RF 16mm) is very highly rated by some but for some reason I have never really enjoyed it using it (focusing it in particular) so mine has been gathering dust since I got the 16mm which I find sharper. My latest acquisition is another Samyang, the 24mm f1.4, the slightly longer focal length is enough to give a different feel to the images and makes the Milky Way or the aurora appear larger and fill the frame better than with a wider focal length and that extra 2 stops of light gathering capability over an f2.8 lens can be crucial on dark nights.
The skies over my church ruins did remain largely clear, I considered moving to another location but opted to stay put and watch things unfold rather than push my luck. For an hour or so I had the place to myself, watching the magic unfold under the big Norfolk skies before eventually I was joined by another photographer so it came as a shock when on Saturday evening I visited Shingle Street in the hope of a repeat and arrived to find at least 50 cars and hordes of people. But no aurora.
On my way home from Norfolk another alert went off and I started making plans to stop off at another location when I was closer to home but Suffolk was shrouded in fog.
And this is the thing, I can’t overstate how fortunate we were to see this display. The aurora can happen at any time of day or year but at this time of year there is only a period of around 4 hours when the skies are dark enough for us to actually see it so for a major storm to happen in that relatively short window and for skies to also be clear was quite a long shot… worth getting out of bed for.
6s / f2.8 / ISO1600 (Canon RF 16mm)
2s / f4.0 / ISO3200 (Canon RF 14-35mm)
15s / f4.0 / ISO800 (Canon RF 14-35mm)