By Violet Li
It has no doubt been a huge year for aurora hunters in Victoria, including for Berwick aurora and astro photographer Mark Osmotherly.
Mark’s shared his story, looking back on the last three years.
The interesting part is the 45-minute notice of the night.
“We know that there’s been solar activity on the sun that could be Earth-directional. It could be like a solar flare that’s come up in the sun, and it could be heading towards Earth,” Mark said.
“There are no guarantees what that’s going to do until it’s about 45 minutes away from Earth.
“We don’t really know how that’s going to look on Earth until we only get about 45 minutes warning, then you need to make decisions about what you’re going to do.
“It’s going to be a quick decision, and often it’s a wrong decision. But I suppose that’s the interesting part of the chase.”
For someone who lived in Berwick, planning and luck were the tricks, Mark joked.
“You certainly need to plan. You need to have your camera bag packed and ready to go, especially for people like myself in Berwick. We’ve got an hour’s drive,” he said.
“There’s a certain amount of luck. There’s a certain amount of planning. There’s a lot of planning, maybe.
“And it can be a fantastic night, and you can be on one beach, and you can have clouds and 50 kilometres down the road can be getting an amazing show.
“So it’s when everything does align, and you capture some photos that display from mother nature. It’s absolutely amazing.”
The last time aurora showed up on Friday 11 October, Mark made the right decision.
“I set my alarm at 3am to check the cloud radars because that was roughly when the prediction was going to be. And the cloud wasn’t very good where I was, so I decided to not go out Friday morning, but to go out Friday night as soon as it got dark,” he recalled.
“I took all my camera gears to work, and I left from work. I drove for two hours to Philip Island from work. I was really fortunate that just as it started getting darker, we got a bit of a gap through the clouds. And I was able to get photos for about the next hour and a half.
“I think it was 55 per cent moonlight. The moonlight obviously competes with the aurora, so you need a brighter aurora to overcome any moon. The bigger the moon is, the less chance you’ve got to catch an aurora through the moon.
“But it was a really big aurora that night.”
On big aurora nights, Mark tends to go to more remote places to get better shots.
“It’s harder to get photos when there are people around. It’s fantastic that people are getting out and experiencing it, but to take photographs with someone’s got a torch on or anything like that, takes away from the photos,” he said.
Travelling afar to capture the untainted beauty is an Odessey alone, but it is not always a lonely journey.
“There’s a community, like some Facebook groups that really support each other, and I got some fantastic support,” Mark said.
“Often I’ll meet some friends there on the night. We might be talking about cloud predictions, and we might try and converge on the same area, and so the last few times I’ve been out have been with people.”
A person who used to casually enjoy photography, Mark turned serious at the beginning of 2022 after seeing some amazing aurora photos from a good friend of his. He finally went out on the following night of big aurora night in February that year.
“I went out the following night and just got what they call a bit of diffused colour,” he recalled.
“I didn’t do the photo very well, but that’s okay. It’s all part of the learning. And I’ve been chasing auras since then.”
If you are one of the aurora chasers and interested in getting a companion in the community, or you simply want to see more aurora photos, follow his Instagram account @markosmotherly.
