So… back in the winter after the worst of our storms here in PEI (90 cm, 120 km / h winds), I snowshoed around the city with my camera.  I shared the resulting photos with fellow members of a forum I belong to, many of them in states and countries that don’t get snow.  I was asked if I could reshoot the same photos in summer, so they could see the difference a season or two makes.   I thought that was a great idea and put a sticky note on my wall to do just that.  Now, a mere 5-ish months later, I finally finished the summer shots and have created some comparisons with a slider.  They have their own page on this site, check them out!

So thanks to a pair of solar flares that both hit Earth at the same time, last night the Aurora Borealis aka Northern Lights, made a rare appearance in Prince Edward Island.  I hit up the North Shore with great company –  John Sylvester and Stephen Desroches.  The big show was scheduled to hit anywhere between 9pm and midnight.  Shortly after 9 pm, we were sitting in a car near Covehead lighthouse, squinting both to see the slight green fog that we knew to be the lights appearing on the horizon, and to avoid the glare of headlights from literally hundreds of cars patrolling the Gulfshore Parkway, full of people also hoping to see the lights.

After a few minutes, we decided to change location and head down the parkway towards Robinson’s Island, where we hoped there would be less traffic (hence less light pollution).  We pulled over in a new location, just a short distance from someone with a telescope larger than a person, I think they were hoping to spot individual ions in the storm.

Shortly after we set up in our new location, someone turned the lights (the Northern kind, not the headlight kind) all the way up.  It was a pretty amazing show.  For 15 or 20 minutes, a green arc stretched across the ocean horizon, with red radiating out above that, and almost white vertical streaks dancing back and forth white cutting through both layers.

This was my first time attempting to shoot aurora, and I really look forward to another opportunity.  Here’s hoping the sun gets another case of the hiccups.

Well I’ve just managed to transfer from my old web hosting to a new one.  It wasn’t without it’s difficulties, and everything got wiped out in the process, but it was worth it.  The time to load a page here is now a second or two, instead of the 30 seconds I was getting before.  Much improved!