Finally!
After years of trying and failing, my wife Liz and I were in the right place at the right time to witness one of the most wonderful atmospheric phenomena, the aurora borealis, or northern lights, in the skies over north Wales.
We were taking a two night break in late February 2023 at the Groes Inn, just a few miles inland from Conway, and were nicely tucked up in bed when Liz's aurora alert app started pinging on her phone.
Knowing that solar activity, and thus the aurora, was as strong as it had been for quite a while, we hastily pulled on some warm clothes over our pyjamas and headed north to the coast.
These bursts of aurora activity tend to only last a few minutes, so we stopped at the nearest point on the coast with a view to the north, which was the beach car park at Penmaenmawr, and I quickly set up my camera to take the hundreds of still images needed to create a time lapse video of whatever was kicking off in the skies above.
Looking north out over the Irish Sea we could just make out a faint green glow on the far horizon, through gaps in the clouds, which, unless the aurora is exceptionally strong, is all you can usually make out with the naked eye at this latitude.
But the camera, with its high ISO low light capabilities, could 'see' far more detail and colour than we could manage.
So it was with some amazement that we viewed the camera's rear screen as it showed us a sky ablaze with rays of red coloured light, even through the patchy clouds that were blowing across the heavens above us.
The vivid red aurora waxed and waned over half an hour or so of filming, until the cloud cover become too dense and the display came to a gradual end.
But Wow! What a wonderful thing to be able to see and film!
And we're both looking forward to the next few years leading up to 2025, which marks the peak of solar activity in this particular eleven year cycle.
Filename - penmaenmawr aurora timelapse 01
Camera - Canon EOS 6DMK2
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 32mm
Exposure (start of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO3200
Exposure (end of sequence) - 10 secs @ f/4, ISO3200
Filters - None.
Shooting interval - 10 sec
Music - Glacier - Patrick Patrikios
Location - Penmaenmawr beach, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p, 30fps (4K and 1080p HD formats also available)
Clip duration - 14 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2023 unless otherwise stated.