The nights here in Estonia have gotten dark again after several months. This means it is again possible to see all the northern lights action. Yesterday the earth got blasted with a strong solar storm and the possibilities to see the lights were great. I held my eye on the live cameras when it got darker, to see if going outside to hunt for colors was worth it. At some point, I started to see quite a good show on the cameras so I took my gear and went outside. I didn't go far, just took some photos near my home.
The trees look all blurry because the wind was quite strong and I used 4-6 sec long shutter speeds.
The photo below was taken directly above my head. If you look closely, you can see two small shooting stars also. I didn't realize that these were on the photo before I opened it up large on my PC.
Sometimes the clouds appeared in the frame and those moved fast due to the strong winds. The clouds in the photo below look so white and bright because the city lights glow those up.
Looks like the lights coming out of the two taller trees.
Suddenly this great patch of green appeared in the sky...
At some point, a lot of purple became visible. The color was also visible to the naked eye.
Took this one straight up again and captured a flying airplane in a photo. It's the vertical line. The photo was 25 seconds long with 250 ISO.
At some point, it seemed like the aurora faded a bit and the activity got less visible. I started to pack up my tripod to go back home but just as I started to walk away, the sky blew up again with lines. I just had to take a couple of more photos.
It was a great start to the northern lights season. I try to catch as many of these events as I can because when winter comes, then 90% of the time our weather is fully cloudy. Fortunately, a lot of solar storms are still to come and therefore a lot of aurora action. We are still in a solar maximum cycle and will be in the next couple of years to come.
