Unexpected Illuminations
This past September, a small group of photographers (and two of their partners) from the Virginia Professional Photographers Association banded up for an unofficial group trip to Iceland. I had the privilege of being part of that group and finding myself in the right place and time for an evening I’ll never forget.
This was my second trip to Iceland, the first being an impromptu journey with an old friend in December of 2018 when I found myself in need of using up vacation days and airline miles before they expired. That trip was just enough to whet my appetite for more. Coming into this trip, I felt a little more prepared and knowledgeable, based on my previous experiences combined with the collective research of the current group. One thing I knew for certain was that our chances of catching the Aurora Borealis, or northern lights, was entirely up to fate – we had a fairly set schedule, and we had no control over the weather, cloud cover, or sunspot activity. I feel like I can speak for most of us to say that we were hoping, but not expecting.
Being relatively familiar with night-sky photography, as the milky way is one of my favorite subjects and deep-sky objects are quickly becoming a growing passion of mine, I’ve been exposed to a number of fantastic aurora photos and the discussions that surround them. I knew that what the camera sees is more intense and colorful than what the eye sees, but I also knew that under the best conditions they were more than easily viewable with just the naked eye. The Carrington Event of 1859 is one of legend, as it was such a significant Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that the city of Baltimore recorded “daylight brightness” at midnight and the northern lights were viewable in Havana, Cuba. This is all to say that while I didn’t know what to expect, I had an idea and a hope.
On the flight from Dulles to Keflavik, I found myself unable to sleep, despite my best efforts, so I would periodically look at the flight map and peek out the window at the darkness. Somewhere over Greenland, I spied an oddly-shaped white cloud that was more hazy and less defined than I’m used to seeing from an airplane window – then I realized that the fact I could see it at all was unusual. Curious, but not expecting, I put my phone camera in manual mode, pushed the exposure and iso as far as it would let me, and took a shot. Fifteen seconds later, I saw a splash of green on my screen telling me that I was witnessing my first ever view of the northern lights. For the next fifteen minutes or so, I fiddled with settings trying to find the right balance of exposure and avoiding reflections or airplane-induced movement. Just as the more interesting of the lights was about to disappear behind the airplane wing, I got a snap that was good enough for viewing on a phone screen, but not much more. I did some quick and dirty edits on Lightroom Mobile and texted it to the rest of the group with the caption “Okay, we can go home now.”
On the evening of the 12th, we were in the town of Vik, shooting the well known black-sand beaches and sea stacks under a heavily clouded sky. By this point, we were well into a rhythm with periodically checking the planetary K-index (Kp, a logarithmic measure of atmospheric ionization) and recognizing that any time we saw a number over 3 where odds of visibility start to increase, we were also looking at solid cloud cover in the sky, so any hopes of northern lights were slowly being dashed. I knew there had been a moderately sized CME the day before with a decent chance of glancing the Earth, so I checked the Kp at dinner via Space Weather (www.spaceweather.com) and about fell out of my chair when I saw a Kp of 5.7 – Storm conditions. About that time, another member of our group got a text alert – “High probability of visible aurora in your area.” We shared a depressed laugh about the cloud cover and headed back to the beach for more black sand shots and a hope of sunset colors. From there, we packed up and headed to our next destination, an Airbnb just outside the entrance of Hrifunes Nature Park. As we got closer, we started to see the sky clear out, continued getting text alerts for northern lights, and debated as to whether that white hazy cloud ahead was lights or just a hazy cloud. By the time we parked, we were somewhere in the window between civil twilight and astronomical twilight – to the naked eye, the sky was dark, but it was still very much reflecting sunlight back towards us. While everyone else was worrying about things like who got which bed or getting their suitcases out of the car, I grabbed my tripod and wide-angle lens and setup right there in the driveway. I had no care for composition, proper settings, or light pollution. I just needed to know what the haze was that I saw in the sky. Thirty seconds later, my shutter clicked shut, and my preview screen showed a washed-out set of light sheets and spears to the northeast, and I ran inside to share the news “Hey guys, we’ve got northern lights!”
I took the opportunity at that moment to unpack my stuff from the car, toss on a few more insulative layers, swap out memory cards and batteries in the camera, and help a few others prep their tripods. Then I headed back outside. Starting in the area just behind the house, I dialed up my usual night sky settings as a starting point – ISO 3200, f/2.8, and 10 seconds. There’s a lot of thumb rules and debate as to “best practices,” but for me I lean towards shorter exposures at higher ISO to avoid field rotation and stars looking like streaks, and these are the settings that I’ve found tend to work for me, even if the noise makes for more difficult processing later on. The next couple hours were a bit of a blur. I was absolutely floating in excitement as I checked off a bucket list item. I felt like I couldn’t point the camera in a bad direction. I kept telling myself to slow down, look for compositions and foreground elements, and create some masterpieces. Turns out I’m not a very good listener when I’m excited. I wasn’t thinking about anything like merit images, or what clients might want. I was too busy having fun. I even posed for a ten-second selfie because all I cared about at that point was the excitement of the moment.
Then another bonus happened – a large, yellow-green fireball lit up the northeastern sky as it streaked across and exploded. Most of us saw it, and there was a cacophony of expletives and shouts of awe. Then two of us began shouting truly magic words “I GOT IT! I GOT IT!” The raucous was so intense that one of our group that chose to stay inside due to feeling ill came out to find out what had happened. I
still can’t find the words to describe how that moment felt without resorting to wild hand gestures and colorful metaphors. It was an awe-inducing and magical moment without a doubt.
Not long after the fireball, cold started to seep in. Some of us were under insulated in our excitement to get started, some of us were insulated just fine, but were losing hand sensation from operating our cameras, and others were just plain exhausted from the long day or poor sleep the night before. Regardless of the reason, most of us started to pack it in, although two of the group stayed out. A few hours later, they came in to report that the lights had shifted from sheets and spears to waves and curtains, even exclaiming “it looked like a green treble clef in the sky!” I kicked myself for not staying out longer, but consoled myself with the knowledge that the sunspot cycle is still climbing in intensity and there will be more opportunities in the future. At this point, it’s easy to “Monday morning quarterback,” and look back, and tell myself what I should have done differently – for example, instead of walking uphill for a wider view, I should have walked downhill to a reflective glacial pool or running moraines of glacial melt for more interesting foregrounds. But what’s even easier than that is to close my eyes and remember the excitement and awe that I felt, particularly after that very first shot when I ran into the house shouting “Hey guys, we’ve got northern lights!”