Aurora

Aurorae at South Pole

These are some Aurora pictures from South Pole taken during the winter 1997. The original pictures are slides and they lost a lot of quality in the scan process. Also the color balance is slightly off, but I think you still get an impresssion of the beautiful night sky here and the awesome natural spectacle of the aurorae.
To get the best out of these pictures, you have to use high color settings, to do this under

Unix/Linux:
start netscape with netscape -install

Windows:
you have to use High Color(16 bit)
(Control Panel -> Display -> Settings, change Color palette to High Color(16bit))

I used a Canon AE-1 program and a Canon FTb with a 28mm lens, both in heated box, because at temperatures around -100°F (-73.4°C) no camera works for long and the film will break when advanced, and a Olympus 35 RC.
All pictures are on Fuji Sensia 100 and 200 most of them with times between 40 and 90 sec. at f 2.8.

Aurorae over Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. You can see the dome, with light escaping the 5 ventilation holes on top, illuminating the US flag. To the left is Skylab.

Aurorae during full moon. The moon is outside the picture on the left. To the right is GASP, which was dismanteled during the summer season 97/98.

Dome entrance with summer camp in the background.

The LIDAR (LIght Detecting And Ranging) laser is coming out of the New Clean Air building to the right.

Aurorae overhead, you can see the so called corona. In the lower left is the Southern Cross and to the right Alpha and Beta Centauri.

Part of Scorpius.

The dome illuminated by the moon.

I made most of my pictures from GASP. I needed 110V for my heated camera box and used also the heated motor box from the telescope to warm up once in a while.

During a aurora outbreak, sometimes so bright that you could see a shadow.

Orion with his upper body in the snow. This how we see the hunter all the time, only legs up into the air. One can just see the second belt star on the horizon.

24 hour exposure of the zenith area. And the earth is turning :))).

The Southern Cross at 6 o'clock, Alpha and Beta Centauri at 5.

A few minutes over the dome, this time without aurorae.

The sun is on the way back up and the sky is getting blue again.

Aurora in the dawn.

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