Epic Aurora

On Monday morning I saw my first ever Aurora.  I'd seen a notification about a CME on 12/07/12 that was headed directly at earth.  When I saw the time it was supposed to reach earth at about 10 am on 14th.  With a busy day on Saturday, I clean forgot about the chances of aurora, and it was a pretty wet day.

Late on Sunday evening, as I was glancing down a list of status updates on facebook, I noticed a friend up north had just commented that they were watching aurora.  My area of town has its street lights turn off at midnight, so once they were off, I picked up my camera, tripod and torches, and went in the hunt of dark sky.  I stopped off first in a park, but there was still some direct light from houses, so after a bit, found a footpath to a field, and set my camera up and waited. 

I think I must have stood in the field for nearly half an hour watching high clouds shift, while listening to the sounds of the night.  Looking to the northerly horizon, I could see that the high cloud had more or less gone, but there was what appeared to be straight lines, running at an angle to the vertical.  I couldnt see much colour, but got my camera focused on the stars of Ursa Major and took an experimental shot of about 6 secs using my quickest lens (50mm, f1.8) and iso 1600.  Success! Over the orange glow of the lights of near by towns, I could see the glow of aurora.

The bands moved slowly towards the east.  Every now and then, I noticed a flash of a thunderstorm, which must have been hundreds of miles away.  To top it off, in the middle of one photo, a meteor tore through the sky.  I think I watched for about half an hour before the aurora faded below being terribly visible.  But all in all, it felt pretty epic.  I think the question might now be "When can I get a trip to the arctic circle to see a full on display"

I've created a set on flickr of my pictures, which post processing to remove the worst of the streetlamp glow look pretty impressive: