What a start to a weekend! Following notification of the strongest aurora for many years going to occur over the Friday night I headed off late evening to some lochs up towards Ullapool, with a hope that the skies would be clear enough to get a viewing of the northern lights again. The phone app had been ‘pinging’ all day from the red level activity - but was it going to continue when the skies eventually got dark - which would be around 11.00pm if not later.
Arriving at the planned location with a disappointing amount of cloud, as the light eventually faded there was no sign of any aurora activity looking north to the direction where I had taken aurora reflection photos end of last year. So I settled down to try and get some sleep in the car, with the phone set to alert me if anything happened. When it alerted soon after 11.00pm I got out of the car and still could see nothing looking north - but as I turned around and looked south I was amazed to see the sky totally pink! I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. The aurora was actually south of us!! Here’s a selection of photos of what the camera saw, with the pink also clearly visible to the naked eye.
As time went on the activity started to show up westwards as well. Amazing colours and intensity. Colour still visible to the eye.
(None of these blog photos have any vibrance or saturation added in editing)
But this was just the beginning - not sufficient words to really describe the views - so I’ll let the next pictures speak for themselves.
With all the activity now predominantly towards the south west, I jumped in the car and headed a few miles up the road to a loch that would give some great opportunity to get reflections westward.
It was here where the most amazing light show took place and was totally awesome. Here’s a selection of some of the incredible shapes and colours.
I felt like I was standing right in the epicentre of the storm - it is no exaggeration to say that light was rising into the skies in every direction, with the strongest activity towards the south west and rising from all directions to a meeting point in the heavens directly above me.
Here are four photos looking in each direction:
For a couple of hours the challenge was knowing which way to look and which way to point the camera to not miss something!
After taking about 90 photos to build a time lapse I suddenly started to feel really tired as well as noticing the cold - so I took a few more photos before deciding that it was time to try and get a bit of sleep in the car before dawn and the plan for hiking up Stac Pollaidh - it was around 2.30am by now. It had been an amazing few hours unlike any previous experience with the auroras I’ve had the privilege to view and capture with a camera. Difficult to see how this could be outdone in the future - but will wait to see what comes in the days ahead.
