Richard Gottardo's aurora photographs give the sky a place to land. A yellow tent, distant town lights and dark mountain forms sit beneath the northern lights, bringing a human scale to a display that can otherwise fill the entire frame. The collection pairs those still images with a time-lapse, but they do not all belong to the same location or night.
Revelstoke photographs and a separate Jasper film
The original feature described an April outing near Revelstoke in British Columbia, involving a mountain camp and planning around cloud. It separately identified a Jasper National Park time-lapse made in Alberta on May 18, 2013. Keeping those settings apart matters: Revelstoke and Jasper are different destinations, and the video is not continuous coverage of the earlier camp shown in the stills.
Star trails and aurora show different motion
Star trails and aurora record different kinds of movement. The trails show the sky's apparent motion over the exposure or combined frames as Earth rotates; the auroral forms change in their own pattern. Look at the steady arcs beside the less regular light. The contrast adds a sense of elapsed time that is easy to miss when attention goes only to the strongest green or purple.
Explore more: Mike Taylor’s Maine aurora photographs; aurora seen from an aircraft window.
Related reading: The Arctic Light: Lofoten’s Long Spring Twilight.
Video: The Northern Lights (published by Richard Gottardo).
The mountain camp reveals the waiting
The tent photograph also makes the waiting part of the subject. A successful night image depends on a usable view through the clouds as well as the display overhead, and the foreground shows something of the photographer's working position. That does not make the documented snowmobile outing a route suggestion for visitors; it explains how this particular set of images was made.
Four hours condensed into a time-lapse
The source describes the Jasper film as more than 1,800 photographs taken between midnight and four in the morning on May 18. The time-lapse compresses those hours into a much shorter viewing experience. Compare it with the stills to see what each format contributes: one lets you linger over the composition, while the other makes the changing sky its central subject. [1]
Sources, photography and further reading
Original feature and image attributions:
- Richard Gottardo
- Northern Lights
- time lapse
- Northern Lights
- My Modern Metropolis
- Glass Igloos with Magnificent Northern Lights Views in Finland
- The Arctic Light, A Really Amazing Video
- Amazing Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis over Norway, Alaska and from Space
- Frozen Air Bubbles in Abraham Lake, Alberta Canada
- A Really Good Snowboarding Video at Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada
- Ice Castle at Silverthorne, Colorado
- Mike Taylor’s Maine aurora photographs
- aurora seen from an aircraft window
- The Arctic Light: Lofoten’s Long Spring Twilight
- The Northern Lights
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