The Northern Lights from Scotland

I've never ever thought about trying to capture the northern lights, I assumed living in Southern Scotland I would never see them locally, how wrong can one be.

These were taken this evening from Fife Ness near the coast guard station which can be seen in a couple of the images, all images taken with a D300 and Tokina AT-X Pro 16-50 f2.8.

































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Cheers Brian

Very nice.
What a great sight
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Nikon Gal
Best Regards
Gale

http://www.pbase.com/techwish

you have a good captures there, some nice shots. Why did you pick 2.8? just curious, I would have picked a smaller aperture.

Amazing pictures, I always thought you had to be much further north to see the Northern Lights.

Good stuff.

I once saw them near Blackpool (less spectacular than your display, but still better than the illuminations). I've read that they'd be visible far more often from the UK but are usually hidden by cloud. Old TVs used to be good indicators of when they were happening as the magnetic fluctuations used to cause interference on the screen.
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Below is the reason you are getting the Northern Lights so low

Product: Geophysical Alert Message wwv
:Issued: 2012 Jan 23 1805 UTC

1. Prepared by the US Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center
2. Geophysical Alert Message

Solar-terrestrial indices for 22 January follow.
Solar flux 141 and estimated planetary A-index 21.
The estimated planetary K-index at 1800 UTC on 23 January was 1.

Space weather for the past 24 hours has been strong.
Geomagnetic storms reaching the G1 level occurred.
Solar radiation storms reaching the S3 level occurred.
Radio blackouts reaching the R2 level occurred.

Space weather for the next 24 hours is predicted to be strong.
Geomagnetic storms reaching the G2 level are expected.
Solar radiation storms reaching the S3 level are expected.
Radio blackouts reaching the R1 level are likely.

Thank you for sharing. I am off to Kiruna (200km north of polar circle in Sweden) in a few weeks time and hope to capture some as well.

Good stuff.
It's the iron in Irn Bru that's attracting the rays

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Lucky you. They appeared this time because of a huge solar storm that happened over the weekend. I see them where I live from time to time but they are just white. I would LOVE to see colored ones like this. Great capture!
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GG

Beautiful....

Apologies for the delay in replying, I've had a very very busy week.

Anyway, many thanks for all the comments, very much appreciated and yes it was a great sight to see and witness.

Karld70 said:

you have a good captures there, some nice shots. Why did you pick 2.8? just curious, I would have picked a smaller aperture.

Click to expand...

25/30sec at f2.8 was just about right, it was too cold to mess about with ra emote release and bulb; what's the point of having f2.8 gear if you don't use it
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Cheers Brian