The Source

Although this picture was taken at the end of the Aurora event the other night, I thought this looked like the Aurora was emerging from this single tree and expanding across the Lake Superior basin to blanket the sky.

I know that this looks heavily edited. However, it is not. I still don’t fully understand why the sky on the left side of the image is so blue when compared to the right side of the picture.

I had positioned the camera so that the moon was just out of frame (There’s a brighter spot in the upper left corner near where the moon is located). So I thought that the light bleed from the moon might have been the cause of the difference. However, I don’t think that explains why there doesn’t seem to be a gradient and instead seems that the separation for the color difference in the sky follows the Aurora.

Weird!

If anyone knows why this would happen, please let me know.

Spirit Tree

Aurora borealis on a moonlit winter night along Lake Superior can provide some really interesting compositions. On moonless nights the sky can show bolder northern lights set in front of a jet black Universe. When the moon is out, as it was this evening, it can wash out those contrasts. The tradeoff, though, is that the moon lights up the landscape with the long exposures needed for Aurora photography and along with the textures and contours of the landscape, the snow sharply reflects the moonlight making it seem as though there are stars imbedded in the ground.

For this particular image, I was not the only person at the location. A young couple was sitting among a cluster of trees that I would have liked to have photographed. However, they were using flashlights inconsistently and did not shut of the LCD screens on their cameras. Both of those light sources would have been very distracting in any of the pictures I would have taken.

In any case, shortly after taking this photo, I glanced at the image on my camera and new it was a keeper. It wasn’t until I opened it up on my computer this morning, though that I saw how interestingly the northern lights mimic the form of the silhouetted white pine.

If you look closely you can make out most of Ursa Major (The Big Dipper) above and beyond the white pine.