Aurora watching in Portland.

I probably drove out an hour too late, trying to scrounge up my wireless remote shutter release. I got out to Sauvie Island around 1:45 am; it's all about the adventure, right? Instead of going straight off the bridge, I instead turned left to make a loop, just so that I could drive along the section of the island that was flat and all farmland, hoping to see if the lights were bright enough to view. Instead, I got treated to two deer grazing off to the side of the road and a jack rabbit running across.

Finally, I reached the spot that I more or less figured I'd settle in on, and take some photos. It's normally a bird sanctuary viewing spot, but it happens to be one of the rare areas on the island with an actual area to park your car, when the park section is closed. Never mind that, apparently across the street is a home with three or four dogs, and won't stop barking if they think you're out there.

Anyway, I set up the gear, and settled in to take some photos, only problem is, it was still too bright in the sky to actually see anything. Or so I thought.

You've seen photos of auroras. What I actually experienced while being in an area still too close to town to be really dark, was a handful of shimmering flashes of a tiny wave of light. There was no possible means of capturing that flash of light waves, as they were too short and too dim. Instead, I had to adjust from 1600 ISO to 6400 ISO, and did longer exposures, in the range of a minute to nearly five minutes. It was only then that I could see, that in fact there was a faint aurora visible, in the purple - pink range.

Another cool thing I found out, was that I was pointed towards the north star, as the longest exposure -- 5 minutes -- showed the rotation around it.

Anyway, long story short, I did capture some tiny part of the aurora, and probably could have done better if I had taken the time to drive out to Mt. Hood or Mt. St. Helen areas, but hey, now I know what it takes to capture the aurora on camera.

If you want to see higher resolution photos (medium resolution, not the highest setting) you can check them out in my Flickr album.