On the 15th May 2005 at 10:30pm I witnessed one of the most amazing displays that nature has to offer. The Aurora Australis.

Watch the video below.

I couldn't help but reflect how insignificant my life is in context. I imagined mankind as a rash on the skin of a living, breathing orb The orb itself was a electron sized iota being cosmically stirred in a hypnotic rhythm around a nucleus called a sun. The vision continued to expand from solar system to galaxy to universe. I understood in that split second that the earth must, perhaps every 5125 years or so, shake the fleas from its back like a big black dog.

I grabbed my camera and a tripod and stepped out into my back yard to record the event. I used a canon powershot pro 1 which has a nice leica L series lens with a fifteen second exposure and a two second trigger delay. May is quite cold in New Zealand and even the pacing to keep warm was enough to slightly blur the images so i was very thankful that digital cameras had been invented. Otherwise i would never have realized i was compromising the picture by pacing around during the exposure.

WHAT IS AN AURORA?

The Aurora Australis is visible on earth in the southern hemisphere and is the ultimate dichotomy of life and death. The Aurora is visible as a life like dancing sheet of memorizing colour across the heavens and is direct result of the very radiation that would otherwise kill us. Thankfully the Earth is protected by an invisible super magnetic force field that encases us like something off a science fiction movie. The centre of our earth is made of a rotating ball of super heated molten metal and the result of this activity produces the electro magnetic field around us.

Occasionally the sun lets off an angry flare which looks like a flame leaping of the surface and is on a relatively massive scale. This results in charged particles energies of between 1 and 100 keV being sent streaming through space in all directions including towards Earth. When this solar wind finally reaches our magnetosphere it becomes trapped and electrically excites the particles of the Earths upper atmosphere producing colour. The solar wind is forcibly directed in towards the Earths North and South poles where it reconnects with the magnetosphere and is swirled into the magnetotail producing wonderful colours.

In the photos below the green and red colours are produced by atomic oxygen. The vivid violet colours are a product of molecular nitrogen. While a picture is beautiful it is hardly a substitute for experience and i sincerely hope that you too are afforded the opportunity to truly experience an event. I have stitched together some of the photos i took with a fade effect to give you an idea of what it looks like.