Mike Taylor’s Maine Aurora Photography: Lighthouses, Barns and Stars

Mike Taylor photographs the night sky over rural and coastal Maine, and he almost always gives it company: a farmhouse, a barn, a pond or a lighthouse. His aurora images from 2013 show the northern lights glowing purple, green and red above places you could drive to, and they helped turn his night-sky passion into a business teaching others to do the same.

From Google Maps to Maine night skies

Taylor’s interest in the stars began in childhood in suburban Maryland. As an adult he worked in Washington, DC, stitching satellite photographs together for Google Maps, before moving to Maine in 2005 to escape big-city stress. He now lives in a farmhouse in Albion, in central Maine, and runs Taylor Photography, which specialises in what he calls landscape astrophotography.

The turning point came on St Patrick’s Day 2013, when a strong aurora lit up the sky while he was photographing at a lighthouse near home. Taylor later described those images as the moment he decided to teach night photography. His workshops now run several nights a week when the weather allows, often four nights a week in season.

What makes the northern lights glow purple, green and red

Auroras form when charged particles from the Sun, carried by the solar wind and bursts such as coronal mass ejections, are funnelled by Earth’s magnetic field into the upper atmosphere. There they excite oxygen and nitrogen, which release the energy as light, mostly at heights of around 100 km.

• Green is the most common colour, emitted by atomic oxygen at 557.7 nm.
• Red comes from oxygen too, at 630 nm, but higher up. The eye is less sensitive to it, so red auroras usually show up well only in strong displays.
• Blue and purple come from nitrogen at the lowest altitudes, usually during high solar activity.

A long exposure collects far more of this faint light than the eye does, which is why Taylor’s photographs show such saturated colour. Maine sits far enough south that it sees the aurora mainly when solar activity is strong, so these nights are special even for local photographers.

How Mike Taylor shoots the night sky

Taylor works with wide, fast lenses and long exposures. One widely published aurora image over a central Maine farmhouse was made on a Nikon D600 with a 14–24 mm lens at 14 mm, f/2.8, 30 seconds and ISO 3200, then processed in Lightroom and Photoshop. Those settings are a good starting point for anyone trying aurora photography on a tripod.

His other rule is about composition. He pairs the sky with a strong foreground, such as a lake, a path, a boathouse or a reflection in a pond, and argues that the foreground should “always win out” so the picture has scale. Winter helps: skies are clearer, there is less coastal haze, and moonlight bouncing off snow lights the land. “Light is my frenemy,” he says.

Lighthouses under the aurora

Lighthouses are among Taylor’s favourite foregrounds. In August 2013 he photographed an aurora from about five feet from the base of Marshall Point Lighthouse in Port Clyde, one of the most photographed sites on the New England coast and a location in the film Forrest Gump. A beam of light from a tower gives the frame structure, while the aurora fills the sky behind it.

Explore more: a panoramic approach to the night sky; light pillars with a different origin.

Related reading

• Ten Northern-Lights Regions: Geography, Darkness and Realistic Expectations
• Kakslauttanen’s Glass Igloos: A Room with a Sky View
• Richard Gottardo’s Aurora Photographs and Jasper Time-Lapse
• The Arctic Light: Lofoten’s Long Spring Twilight
• Aurora from Norway, Alaska and Orbit

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