Aurora Australis over the South West – 18th March 2015

I woke up at about 1am and decided to check the Space Weather site as there had been reports of a potentially large Aurora Australis. I was pretty excited on looking at the site as we were in the middle of a KP8 solar storm and there were reports of the Aurora being seen quite far north of Perth! I grabbed my gear and decided to head out to see if I could find some gaps in the rain and clouds that were over the South West.

I started by checking it out at Injidup on the coast, it was really cloudy but I decided to do a couple of long exposures to see if there was any colour. At first I thought that I’d done something weird with my white balance as all my photos were turning out nearly completely pink! After my eyes adjusted I realised that the sky was actually visibly pink and that what I was capturing, through the clouds, was the Aurora:

 

I decided to head further south to see if I could get a break through the clouds, I headed initially to Gas Bay in Margaret River, but it was raining pretty hard there, so I kept moving south and checked out Redgate Beach, I was rewarded with a few gaps in the clouds just as things were really lighting up, it was pretty crazy to be able to see all the colours in the sky!

 

 

With more cloud approaching from the West I headed further south to see if I could get something in the Boranup Forest, I’ve had a few shots that I’ve wanted to experiment with in the forest at night for awhile now, I’m pretty happy with the results. I was lucky enough to get a couple more breaks in the cloud and rain, I used the car headlights and a torch to light up the forest a bit. The weird colours around the edges of the trees are from the branches swaying in the quite strong wind:

 

Overall I’m pretty happy with the photos, I got quite lucky with the breaks in the clouds and rain.