Lights, camera, action

By Paul Taylor

Queenstowners will likely have another chance to marvel at the Aurora Australis this week after one of the best displays in recent years. Hundreds of photographers headed out after dark last Monday to capture the dazzling Southern Lights.

Georgia Wallis, who captured this stunning shot, says there were more than 50 people at Jack’s Point lakefront alone, prompted by the Queenstown Aurora Australis Facebook group, run by well-known local photographer Blair Pattinson.

“It was so bright you could see it with the naked eye, you didn’t need the camera skills or gear to appreciate it,” Wallis says.

“For a period of about 20 minutes, it just kept getting brighter and brighter. There were beams coming up everywhere, red and pink, which are apparently rarer than the green and purple ones.”

Wallis says she’d been at the beach about an hour before the display started. “I was about to leave and was just taking pictures of the mountain at that point, and then in a corner of one of the pictures I saw a beam. We turned around and you could see it in the sky. It’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

Both Aurora Australis and Aurora Borealis were particularly active due to solar storms, which fire out high-energy particles, which then interact with the earth’s magnetic field. They hit atoms in the upper atmosphere creating a glowing field of excited gas, causing the incredible natural light shows. More auroras are expected this week due to what is known as a ‘period of solar maximum’. Every 11 years, the sun is particularly active, with lots of sun spots near the surface.

South Island is likely to get the best displays, with the aurora viewable close to the horizon on a clear night.

Wallis, who works at Shotover Primary, says the lakefront near Jack’s Point, looking towards Kingston, is a good spot because there’s not so much light pollution.

“You can capture it on a camera, using a low exposure so you get loads of light, but there were people there taking shots with iPhones, and they picked it up.”