Just the other day I thought that I have seen northern lights and photographed these several times this year but not one even has been exceptionally strong, like the one last year. Not much time left anymore to see anything big. Well, a couple of days ago I got many alerts and the graphs looked great. A strong magnetic storm was going on but it was bright outside. Sun sets around 9 pm right now and it sky gets dark around 11 pm. I was having a hard time waiting until dark and I couldn't manage to wait anymore, I drove to the nearby beach and this is what I saw.
I had never been photographed with northern lights with not fully dark skies before. The sky is bright but you can clearly see some green glow up there.
Purple lights.
Soon the activity got down and I didn't see anything anymore. Since the graphs were absolutely great and there was a great chance for more action, I decided to drive further away from light pollution to another beach. When I arrived the sky was dark now and I could see some more action again.
The night was great in terms of weather, to sit around for a long time. It was warm with 13 degrees C temperatures and almost no wind.
It was quite a good activity for a couple of hours but nothing too crazy. Here are some shots.
By the way, I used a new feature in Lightroom. The AI denoise tool removes all the little noise I get in these dark photos but it does it without sacrificing any detail and it works great! The night pictures are exceptionally clear now.
The solar storm was as strong as G3 most of the time which is a strong storm and even was G4 at one point which is a very strong solar storm. G4 doesn't happen very often.
At around 1 am, my girlfriend got tired a bit and she wanted to start going home. I wasn't a fan of this idea because I had a feeling that soon the sky will blow up with lights even more. I convinced her to wait some more. It was gread I did because 10 minutes later the sky really did blow up and it was absolutely crazy to see.
Lights were everywhere pretty much. In the north, even in the south and above our heads.
The following photos are taken straight up of the action above our heads and it looked spectacular. These lights were pulsating and I haven't seen this kind of view before. You cant see the pulsating in the photo, unfortunately. The lights were dancing very fast above our heads.
A while after the activity started to fade. We left around 2 am.
It was a crazy show and I got what I wanted. I was absolutely fortunate to finish the northern lights season with this amazing event. The season is pretty much finished here because in a couple of weeks, our nights won't get dark anymore so no northern lights to see with bright sky even if the storm is strong.
In fact, this G4 storm was so strong that some northern lights were even seen as far south as in Slovakia, Czechia and Ukraine and mid-Germany. That's crazy because these places very rarely can see any northern lights glow.
I live in Estonia if you don't know me.
I did also capture time-lapse videos, I will put these together and publish it here soon enough too! Stay tuned.
