Northern Lights in the South

The sky was completely obscured by clouds yesterday and the night before, but today it was clear, so André and I headed out of Bonn around ten to find the northern lights that one supposedly had a chance to see here. A few kilometres out of town, we stopped in the fields and saw – wow! – half of the sky was lit up in pink. There also were some greenish areas. The lights seemed quite bright to me, but I’ve never seen northern lights before, so they could be pale compared to what you get in, say, Norway.

Anyway, we were duly impressed by the show and set up the camera on a tripod. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to get it to make an exposure that lasts for longer than one second. And – you guessed it – I left the instruction manual at home, so the first exposured didn’t reveal anything but two or three broken pixels, one right in the middle of the pictures. If I had had a mobile phone, I might have considered giving Susan a ring for instructions…

Since the lights disappeared after a while, we decided to go home to fetch the manual and then to return and see if we could get some lights on film memory card. Alas, the lights did not return, and near midnight we decided that it was getting cloudy and we were getting cold and tired, so we drove home. This is the only shot in which you can see a little bit of colour in the sky.

The traffic and traffic lights are in the picture because I wanted to see how the long exposure time worked; it was about 40 seconds here.

If the sky is clear again tomorrow (or maybe early this morning?), I might give it another try.