Auroras and the Like

One of the biggest original draws to the Antarctica Program for me was the chance to see auroras with my own eyes.

Buuuuutttt I’m completely awful at taking photos of the sky and such. When I try and take some awesome photos, they end up like this:

Though I did make this neat gif file which makes my shitty photos look slightly better!

Thus, I’m going to share some awesome photos that OTHERS have taken. I stole these from their Facebook pages… hopefully they don’t mind. If they do they know they can tap me on the shoulder in the galley and ask me to remove them!

A few nights ago we had some of the strongest auroras I’ve seen with my bare eyes. Will Shankles and Liz Widen took/posted these photos of them:

Here’s a few more taken by Timothy McPhee from the same night:

Then there’s these two photos by Stephen Allinger. Here is a video time-lapse he created recently. You can see his photography page here.

Finally, some photos of the sky over Ross Island by Joshua Swanson. His public page is here.

Gahhhh I’m so in love with these photos and these skies. A few nights ago Steve and I went on another hike out to see some stars. It was amazing. You can almost see what you see in these photos with your bare eyes.

Even better, the TV was saying it was -71°F outside when windchill was taken into account. However, Antarctica is so dry that the lack of humidity actually makes that bearable! We only had to give in and come back after we’d been laying on the ice for a while and our bums and toes were starting to hurt!

I don’t want the sun to come up! I am going to miss these stars.