First Aurora ever

Yesterday I got a visitor from Vancouver, Canada. He's staying here in Östersund for the week ahead. He landed at Åre/Östersund airport late in the evening and after a couple of hours of installment I took him out Aurora hunting. This was the first ever Aurora for him so I'm really glad we did get to see it.

One of the best experiences as a astrophotographer is to watch someone see their first Aurora, to see their reactions and hear their thoughts is very rewarding. It's also very useful for me as a photographer since it gives me inspiration and new ideas for future projects.

Optics Picture of the Day

Today I'm featured as Optics Picture of the Day on Atmospheric Optics with this picture showing upper and lower Moon pillars. This photo is taken on the same night as the previous shot with Mars, Moon and the church, but taken 15 minutes earlier and from a higher point.

Down to the right you can see the same church as in the previous picture and in the middle you can see the newly built skyscraper in Östersund called Fagerskrapan. The bright dot to the left is planet Mars.

Read more about the upper and lower Moon pillars at Atmospheric Optics website - http://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz991.htm

Mars meets Moon

Last night planet Mars was pretty close to the Moon. Here you can see Mars just above one of the churches in Östersund. The clouds and a mist laying over the lake of Storsjön reflected the light from the Moon very nicely. The light pillar in front of the Moon is due to ice crystals in the air being lit up by the Moon. The effect is commonly known as Moon pillar.

All Sky Time Lapse 2014-02-27

Another video showing the entire sky filled with Aurora. This time the Aurora had much more red color that that from March 17 in 2013. There were also several coronas and they are clearly visible in the movie. North is down. It's recommended that you watch the video in high resolution.

Music: Chris Zabriskie - Cylinders - Cylinder Two (http://chriszabriskie.com)

Northern Lights big style

On Thursday 27 of February we had a fantastic aurora here in Östersund with lots of red colors. I took the opportunity to make my biggest panoramic image so far. The image below consists of 23 separate images with a 360 degree coverage from the horizon and all the way up to zenith. The original image has a resolution of 25,000 x 14,000 pixels at 300 dpi and with a 16 bit color depth. The file size of the finished Photoshop file with all 23 layers is 13 Gb. I've included a 100% crop from the original image to give you an idea of the resolution in the image. The container is marked with a red square in the image.