MickPt

Wow, that's so pretty!

It is amazing you got such shap pictures of it. I have seen a few of them, although from a bit less far north in areas with more electric light polution, and all I ever got when I tried to capture it was a few colored blurrs in the pitch black.

In all they years I lived in the northern suburbs of Detroit I used to have one or two chances almost each winter and followed all the northern lights photography tips with the old film camera. Our tripod is really heavy as our first bird spotting scope in the 90's was very heavy too, we had a nice extern release with a ridiculously long cable (courtesy of dad who took family pics with the thing whilst posing himself), I even bought film just for the lights with higher ISO, 400 I think I recall, and of course I put no UV or polarisation filtres on but used the sun blind and a freshly cleaned bare lens only. We went to parks that where billed for great views of the phenomenon and open after dark on winter evenings with forecast and we saw them almost as good as in the professional posters and TV shows about natural wonders, just a bit low towards the horizon which meant none to wide angles possible... and I of course varied exposure times and fooled about with the shutter speed.

Only in the pics later we saw more of the sheen towns further north produced and less of the northern lights each time. I guess the human brain has its own filter for the light pollution, other I can not explain I never found the darkest backdrop area. :o(

I am a bit yealous you got stars poking through and almost hyperrealistic reflections of the light colour in the snow, but no weird yellow light drummlins erasing the lights totally in areas looking deserted and wooded from afar but in reality contain populated places all over. There must be really not much of anything north of the lens but true wilderness and the lights.....

@Martina: exposure 20 seconds, f:6.3 and focal length 17 mm (25 mm eq.). I think I used such a long exposure beacuse I wanted the water with the "flow" effect. Truth is that the exposure is a little bit too long because the stars are no longer single dots as they sould be. In a 20 seconds exposure you end up capturing and mixing a lot more than what our eyes can see at each moment.