Cassiopeia - Photobombed

[jimjam11]

In Nov 2014 we went to Iceland hoping to see the northern lights. An utterly amazing country but all we saw was cloud so our first trip was an aurora failure. We returned to Iceland at the end of Nov this year and were greeted by 40mph winds and a resulting wind chill of -18! However, the skies were clear so aurora watch was on.

We saw the faintest hint of aurora on night 1 but the wind was brutal so it was impossible to stay out for long. On night 2 the aurora was far more active, the wind slightly lower but there was high level cloud. We still spent hours enduring the wind amazed at the dim, but dancing lights above us.

Everything changed on night 3. Night 3 was completely clear and the wind had dropped substantially. The aurora came out to play properly...

This is a single 6s exposure on a 6D with the Irix 15mm @F4 and ISO 3200. Almost no processing in Lightroom beyond lens correction and a hint of noise reduction. The Aurora is such a strange phenomenon and so dynamic that normal astro processing doesnt seem to work!

I have a load of other images and some timelapse that I will also share when I have managed to process it...

[geordie85]

A beautiful image. I went to Iceland at the end of last month too, I saw the aurora for the first time in my life but clouds and full moon did make it difficult. 

I will return closer to solar maximum and around the new moon

[JOC]

That's lovely

[davew]

Wow !!

What more need to be said ? I don't get to see too many Irix images either.

Dave,

[jimjam11]

In the run up to this trip I tested 4 samyang lenses and returned them all due to aberrations. In the final week before we went I took a punt on the irix and luckily the first one was great. It isn’t quite as sharp as the samyang 14mm but the lack of distortion more than makes up for it. In addition it has nice features such as the infinity focus detent which makes life easier, especially when it is -18 and you are getting hammered by a 40mph wind!