I received the photo on the left from Peter here in the UK who had been in contact with Bjørn Jørgensen who I mentioned in an earlier blog post. The photo was taken last February and the two people in the image are my partner Sue and I. I instantly recognised us and knew who had captured the image and it just brought back some great memories of our holiday in Norway and the auroras.
I met Bjørn last February over looking Ersfjordbotn and spent a really enjoyable evening capturing the auroras and chatting in general with him. He is a very engaging photographer and extremely friendly. Hopefully when we return to Ersfjordbotn in February we will get the chance to meet up him again.
Bjørn has an extensive library of amazing aurora images. He is lucky enough to live close to Ersfjordbotn and his portfolio really does stand out due to their quality and I can highly recommend you spend sometime having a look at his website www.arcticphoto.no . I have also included an image he emailed to me below. When you see corona's and the auroras like this you know why people go to Norway and often like us go back after 1 taste.
I would just like to thank Bjørn again for allowing me to use his images.
We are now less than a month away from going back to Ersfjordbotn and I am so looking forward to returning. I believe the weather hasn't been the best this aurora season so far, but as we have hired a 4x4 car this time hopefully we will get the chance to explore more and find the clear skies that are a must to see the lights dancing for you.
Since my last blog a couple of solar storms and also sun spots have been active and so maybe we haven't passed solar maximum just yet and maybe 2013 will be the year. The 2 sun spots AR1652 and AR1654 are very large and so here's hoping they still contain enough energy to be active when we are there and so I will be keeping a very close eye on these in the days to come. I read on the Space Weather website someone mentioning the sun looks like a very spotty teenager at the moment due to all the sun spots and so if it continues like this then the outlook for our trip is very good. After a quiet few months maybe the solar activity is picking up.
I looked up the date when we were watching the auroras with Bjørn and it was early March last year, when I then went back to archives on the Space Weather website I was surprised/shocked to see the planetary K-index (KP index) was rated as just KP1 (quiet) and yet there were times we just stood there in awe at the wonderful sight of the displays in the sky.
That night made up our minds to return so maybe it just goes to illustrate that you read as much information on as relevant websites as you like, but just because you think it won't be a good evening from what you have determined from all the sources of information and data, it can though count for very little. The only true way to determine this is to find that clear sky and to get out and look for yourself.
This weekend I will be having a little play around with time lapse photography in preparation of hopefully being able to put together a video clip of the auroras when we are there. This is something very new to me and I haven't tried it before, but hopefully with more than a little trial and error I will have something I am happy with first and foremost myself that I will then share with the readers of my blog.
On that subject I would just like to thank everyone for taking the time out to read my blog and I hope you have find some of my posts useful, appealing and it inspires you to visit a country where you can see the auroras. If you have a travel related bucket list and seeing the auroras borealis is on it, then just go. But, go for as long as you can afford it. If you expect to turn up and mother nature to just switch on the Northern Lights as you are only there for a couple of days, you could go home bitterly disappointed.
