What better place to be on Halloween night than watching the Aurora Australis put on a show from Pyramid Rock Lookout, Phillip Island, surrounded on 3 sides by the Great Southern Ocean and not a soul nearby. This was the result of the solar flare from a few days back. I tried to spot the aurora the previous night, to no luck. But the next night the CME had arrived and the Aurora Australis (the Southern Lights) were very active.

After spot checking the back of camera periodically between 9.45pm and 11.45 pm, I was a little concerned that lady Aurora would stand me down and be a no show for the second night in a row. Had some nice chats with 3 groups of people who were down for the dark night sky vistas. The CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) from the half halo X1 solar flare off the sun around 3 days prior was expected to sweep past earth the previous night, but the solar wind was clearly travelling more slowly than originally modelled. So I decided to make the best of a potentially disappointing night by taking some general Milky Way wide-angle shots. Then at 11.45pm I decided to point the camera south once again and do one last check of the back-of-camera display, before moving to a different location. Love that adrenalin rush when all you see are pink beams – Woww ! Even managed to get a pink reflection of the most intense part of the Aurora off the Southern Ocean.

While I normally shoot aurora with a wide angle (24mm on a full frame), this time I decided to capture a time-lapse sequence (which I’ll post later) with a 50mm lens – for us Victorians more distal from the aurora, that “transports you south” and makes you feel you are in the thick of things in Tasmania. Below is the 50mm lens view. So for the next time she appears, I may need 2 camera bodies to mount both the 24mm f1.4 and the 50mm f1.8 lenses on!

On the walk out at 1.30am, after the aurora had subsided, I crossed paths with 3 fairy penguins a metre off the path between the two board walks. I could hear them as I was photographing, but was surprised they were so far up the cliffs of Pyramid Point.