Amazing northern lights over Oslo tonight! Winter solstice is just hours away, and this must be the most amazing way to celebrate that the long nights soon, and very slowly, will get shorter and shorter. I was looking forward to many hours of auroras, but alas, clouds suddenly moved in from the south and thus […]
What an amazing night!! Perfect conditions due to a high pressure system. No wind, and no significant clouds during totality. After totality and towards dawn, lots of high clouds appeared. Totality was incredibly dark, and is the darkest I’ve ever seen. Lunar eclipses cannot compare to a solar eclipses, but this one I will remember […]
Clear skies and auroras two days in a row! Wow! That’s truly rare, but nonetheless wonderful. The air was very damp and the glow from the city lights is quite something else than during a windy and dry night. Hopefully there will be more clear skies during the equinox, as that is a favorable time […]
Finally a moonless aurora night!! Even within the dome of Oslo’s light pollution this was a great display. Hopefully there will be more clear skies and auroras as we approach equinox.
A very busy couple of days Aurora-wise, and the second time for me since since the Perseids the 13th! Without the bright moon this would have been an amazing display for us at 60 degrees north.
What an incredible number of coincidences in one night! First of all a clear night – a rarity this summer! Add the first aurora borealis after the bright summer nights and a fireball into the mix, and you have the 2015 Perseids seen from inside the light pollution of Oslo! A close-up of the biggest […]
I will never forget the 2 days I had on top of Socotra in the Haghier mountains. This is the highest of them all – Skand – looking west. At this time there’s no Milkyway in the west, so the stars are just tiny dots on the sky. Some green airglow is seen here, though. […]
A starry sky seen from the highest parts of Socotra, an amazing end to an amazing day. I wish I had many more nights in the Haghier (also called Haggeher or Hajhir) mountains of Socotra. At least I was in luck this night, as I could see the stars for a bit before the clouds […]
I did’t have high expectations tonight due to the full moon, but I set up my camera to do timelapse. To my surprise there was a great ouburst just minutes after I set up the camera, and I missed all of it because I opted to go indoors and let the camera do its job! […]
A crisp and clear night with freezing winds, and a very bright moon! A moon this bright is very bad for watching stars as well as northern lights. Perhaps in the far north where the light is always very bright, the moonshine could add a wonderful dimension to the auroras, but here far to the […]
I stayed many days deep in the Peruvian Amazon, in the biodiverse Madre de Dios region where life is abundant every second of every hour of the day and night. The nights are pitch black and intense with sounds and scents, and only the full moon in a cloudless night will provide rays of light […]
I stayed many days deep in the Peruvian Amazon, in the biodiverse Madre de Dios region where life is abundant every second of every hour of the day and night. The nights are pitch black and intense with sounds and scents, and only the full moon in a cloudless night will provide rays of light […]
Even though the night sky is heavily polluted by the lights of Oslo and its suburbs, there are many stars visible to the naked eye only a few kilometres out of the city, like here from Svartskog. Even more so when using a camera with long exposure and high iso. This is due north, which […]
After a long, gloomy and most of all cloudy winter, spring has arrived and with it longer days and finally clear skies! At 60 degrees north, the chances of seeing northern lights are small as the majority occurs below the northern horizon and even if above it’s so dim you must know what too look […]
What amazing luck – just a couple days after my trip to Brazil I experience this! What an amazing winter this could be…. Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the display, and the lights were only dim and intermittent until dawn. Many months laster it became very clear how lucky I was, as this winter […]
It was a clear sky this evening, and as I was walking my dog away from my house I didn’t notice anything in the northern sky. On my way back I stopped by one of my neighbors. I asked Bjørn Tore for his camera so I could take a shot to verify. It was definitely […]
Catching the Aurora Borealis is perhaps easy in the northern parts of Norway or in general around the Arctic Circle, but at 60 degrees north where Oslo resides it’s another matter entirely. Only the strongest magnetic storms will light up the sky to zenith, and even then the event could be missed as some “shows” […]
Yet another brief and weak display. Only the green was visible to my eye, so without the camera I would not have known or seen the gorgeous purple. Unfortunately the clear sky was completely covered not long after this shot, so whatever followed was not for me to see. I’m very fortunate I don’t have […]
The moon is adding a lot of light to this vista of a calm ocean and an almost cloudless sky. Just a few seconds later and it’s all changed and moved across half the sky. It moved so incredibly fast! This was in fact the only strong lights during this almost 2 hour long timelapse:
Despite the bright light from the near full moon and the light halo of Oslo, the low hanging northern light is visible as a faint green glow just above the northern horizon. Perhaps the very last opportunity before the night of northern summer is but a passing twilight. It’s a bit frustrating with night upon […]
Not often you can see a comet this big over a light polluted capital like Oslo!
The Bunnefjord (the sibling of the Oslo fjord) has now been frozen over for many weeks and the ice is thicker than in many years. This night was without any clouds and it was incredible to be able to walk on the fjord as the moon was rising in the east. As I was walking […]
At this time of year the Milkyway is not as prominent as in the summer months, but there are so many stars to be seen at any time of year at this altitude and in particular in the dry air of the dry season when this was shot. This is a 23 second time-lapse spanning […]
This was an incredibly windy and cold night, and it was really hard to find a place away from the wind to set up the camera for long exposures. Even with my down jacket, woolen socks, long johns and gloves, I simply had to leave the camera behind and go back to my room to […]
Traveling around the huge salt flats of Salar de Uyuni is no easy task, as the distances are vast and you have to bring all you need including gas for the car, as well as find the very few places you can sleep at night. The humans living on the edge of the salt flats […]
This is just a few kilometres from the Chilean border and here the sleeping and lodging options are almost non-existent, and being so remote and in a desert you’d never expect to find it either, except that there is one decent option here called Tayka del Desierto. This high-altitude service is where I gazed in […]
Being a desert the air is dry, and here you can see starsets! Usually only the sun or moon and the planets shine bright enough to be seen all the way to the horizon, but here all the stars seen high in the sky are also equally visible all the way to the horizon. In […]
Bolivias highest mountain – 6542 metres high – facing south. What a magnificent moment – the Large Magellanic cloud right above Sajama, the Milkyway to the left and a meteor! The dawn is just minutes away, and the first photons of light are flowing in from the rising sun (to the far left of the […]
This was my first night at this altitude, and I was really struggling. The landscape and sky was incredibly beautiful, but I was unable to fully enjoy it due to intense headache and sometimes the feeling of insufficient air. As I was not fully adjusted I had to take two breaths of air instead of […]
The sunspots are now growing in size and frequency, with the promise of much Aurora Borealis the coming months – weather permitting! The largest sunspots here are designated AR1532 (lower left) and AR1530 (lower right).
Altitude 3083 metres. See Atmospheric Optics for more on halo and how it forms.
The Draconid meteors are generally faint, so with a near full moon the amount seen this night were few and far between. Being inside the huge dome of Oslo’s light pollution adds to the overall dimming of the meteors. I saw mostly very faint “blips”, and once in a very long while some bright streaks […]
This is a composite of 14 exposures that all contain one or more Draconids, making the dotted star trails. As Oslo and the near full moon strongly pollutes the dark sky, a full long exposure star trail scenario would simply add too many air planes and light too see the faint meteors. Most of the […]
Finally some intense auroas AND clear skies! It seemed at first to be only a dim band high in the northern sky, but at around 23:15 local time (21:15 UT) a sudden burst in intensity and spread! It covered all of the sky up to and a bit beyond zenith. This time lapse spans more […]
There are countless waterfalls on and off Roraima, large and small. If the sun is out and the angle is right, a rainbow will flash as in this photo. One can walk to such a place, or sit by one and wait until the sun and angle makes it happen all on it’s own.
Since the first shots at around 20:40, the clouds moved in and the northern lights slowly withdrew to the north, as if the show was over. 3 hours later while walking my dog I see a fast moving swirl over the tree tops, and quickly walk home to grab the camera. There were no more […]
Seeing northern lights in the light pollution of Oslo is one thing, another is weather conditions. This autumn has not been favorable, with long periods of overcast and rain. Finally everything came together for a great veiwing. This time the display was mostly a dim and mellow veil, stretching allmost to zenith. Only few and […]
The forecast suggested a great show this evening. I went out and looked for the northern lights several times without seeing any, and I wasn’t really surprised, as the summer sky still was very bright, and the northern lights had to be very strong to compete. I only got one shot where the northern lights […]
Going to this remote atoll in the south pacific I was in anticipation of a clear sky and no light pollution. The sky was not entirely clear, so I had to wait for the small clouds to pass between shots. The amazing thing is that with no visual aid I could see the shadowbands of […]
According to the Auroral Oval there should be strong auroras – alas! I was glimpsing what could be northern lights, but they were weak, and featureless. Disappointed I was heading to bed, but one final look outside revealed something interesting. I grabbed my camera and tripod, and rand outside. Unfortunately, before I had set it […]
Even during the time of the deepest solar minimum in a century, it’s possible to see the aurorae. Albeit dim and hardly vislible to the untrained eye. It was a mild, windy and starry night. The grasshoppers playing in the trees. Low in the northern sky I could see a very faint hue of green. […]