Last night the good aurora forecast tempted me out with my camera but I ended up coming back with pictures of night clouds and star trails.  I headed up to a local viewpoint in the forests above Äsperöd with camera, tripod, warm clothes, flask of coffee and a sandwich to wait and see if the aurora would show itself and I could get some pictures.  I got some alright but they weren’t of the aurora.

As sunset approached the forecast got less and less optimistic so I tried to capture some star trails over Uddevalla. That wasn’t going to be easy either as it was getting cloudy and windy.  Fortunately my new Olympus has a great feature called live composition.  Last night I set it to take a 5 second exposure every five seconds for five minutes.  The camera then records anything that has changed from one picture to the next.  This means that stars make curved trails, planes make diagonal dotted lines (see the first picture) and clouds seem to flow.  It’s the clouds that really make these pictures.

The real beauty of live composition is that the picture gets painted on the viewing screen on the back of the camera as each image is added.  So you can sit and watch it develop whilst sipping hot coffee.  There were, of course, some downsides.  The mosquitoes were a nuisance when the wind dropped and walking back through the forest alone in the dark was really spooky.  I think the pictures were worth it though.  The colours of the clouds and sky were not what I expected. They changed as the sun slid further and further below the horizon and in the last picture the orange tint comes from the lights of the town.