Can’t help myself! Just have to share some more aurora shots.

The day after the previous shoot, I set about, in daylight, to find a better location; somewhere with a good line of sight, lots of northern horizon and preferably a lake in the foreground. I found the perfect spot at the boat launch at Sandbar Lake Provincial Park. Just 15 minutes north of home up Highway 599, it had the perfect exposure and even a dock extending straight north into the lake!! Turned out I wasn’t the only one who thought this might be a great spot. It was just a few days later that I got a text from my photo buddy, Mel, that she was at the park, in the dark, alone. I rushed to meet her there, as a true friend should.

There hadn’t been much to see and even when we got out of our vehicles in the safety of each other’s company, the sky was full of stars winking as if they shared a secret. We relocated to the boat launch I had picked out previously and found to our horror that there was a huge yard light extravagantly painting everything an evil shade of yellow and creating bizarrely distorted shadows.

Here we sit pondering the situation. There was a little bit of mist rising on the water as odd globs of green appeared and vanished on the horizon and above us adding to the chill on our bodies and in our imagination.  We moved again to a darker and thankfully less creepy part of the shoreline, the public beach. Note the floats marking the safe swimming area (below).

The orangey-yellow shoreline at the very left of the shot is the despicable boat launch yard light and the extent of it’s effect out on the water.  To the very right, a red-purple begins to appear and we turned our lenses northward again from this new vantage point.

And it began!

And then it kinda fizzled out which was okay with us at that point. The temperatures had dropped to 4C and we had not anticipated how cold that can feel after unseasonably warm September days!

It was a fabulous show and truly did not look in really life like the camera captured! The naked eye could only pick up the some of the shades of yellowy green. It wasn’t until each long (20-30 second) exposure popped happily up on our preview screens that we were aware of any of the other colouring or most of the light!

I’m certain the show continued without us as my Aurora Forecast app notification kindly announced once I was toasty warm under my covers, that the activity was ramping up! Next time.