We had been warned that there had been some increased solar activity in the last few days which meant that there may be an aurora to see. To view an aurora, you need to be far enough south so that you are near the south magnetic pole but because it is summer, you also need to be far enough north so that you get some darkness overnight. Too far south and it doesn't get dark. We are at about 56 degrees south, 115 east. When we were further south, it was still light at night.
Currently the sun sets about 11 pm, and then comes up again about 4 am, and there is an hour or so of twilight after sunset, so there is not a great window, but last night, just as there was still a haze of light to the south, the clouds cleared enough around 1am to see a nice green aurora.
The picture actually looks a bit more impressive than it was in reality, becasue the camera can see it better than our own eyes. The aurora was quite faint, so you had to be outside for at least 10 minutes for your eyes to adapt to the darkness to really see it. At first it looked a bit like a faintly coloured cloud across the sky, because at very low light levels, the human eye doesn't see colour very well.
After a while, I was able to see a large curtain like glow which came and went over about a 10 minute period, but then the clouds moved over the ship and it was all over.
The picture here is taken from the top deck of the ship - it is actually 3 wide-angle photos joined together (13 sec, f3.5, 10mm ). The big white line across the bottom is the ship's spotlight. You can see that the stars appear as strange wiggles of light - this is due to the fact that the ship is rocking about a fair bit, and the camera is on a tripod on the ship. Since it is three different pictures joined together, the wiggles of the stars are different as you look across the final picture.
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