Capturing the Aurora Borealis over Killiney Hill and Dublin Bay in October 2024

October 21, 2024  •  Leave a Comment

With 11 finished Aurora pictures and 5 "how I developed them" images.
Links to local places are to my pictures of them, or from them.

BUY images here as digital downloads and as A3+, A3 & A4 prints and special orders of larger sizes - including two auroras from 2015 & 2016!

Introduction

I’d say almost everyone with an interest in nature, the skies and the outdoors knows now that much of the northern hemisphere was treated to a stellar display of the Aurora Borealis on Thursday night the 10 and 11 of October – following a major coronal mass ejection from the sun two days earlier. Indeed, this is the best year for the Northern Lights since 1989 and 2003 - here’s an archive video from RTE of the displays just before Halloween, 21 years ago (you may have to accept cookies to get it to play). We’re getting lots of auroras since the current sunspot cycle, solar cycle 25, is proving more intense than expected during its "maximum" phase and this is likely to continue into next year. Also, we’re much more aurora aware nowadays with all the coverage they get in the press and social media - such as in this excellent article in The Journal by Nicky Ryan with loads of great geeky background information too!

 

1. Diarmaid under the aurora at the communications tower at 10:27pm on Killiney Hill – with the Seven Sisters (Pleiades) above his head and Jupiter to his left (20s, f3.5, ISO 3200).

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These cosmic displays are not all good, though. There were major power cuts in Quebec and the USA after the 1989 event and the 2003 event interrupted communications and damaged space missions. In 1859, the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history, the Carrington Event, turned night to day in the mid-latitudes, was visible close to the equator, and had major impacts on the then new telegraph. While its exact strength is unknown, if it happened today with our huge dependence on electricity and satellites, it could wreak global havoc. Fortunately, we now monitor the sun for geomagnetic storms, generate space weather forecasts, and protect electricity grids, and communications and GPS networks. And the space weather forecasts also alert astrophotographers!

Last week’s event was the second this year, following on the auroras of 10 May that were also widely visible in Ireland. Unfortunately, I missed that one so I was longing for another chance and the adrenaline rose when my usual sources started pinging alerts on 9 & 10 October. These include Aurora Alert UK, Carlow Weather, Weather Alerts Ireland,  and NOAA  with their graphic predictions. NOAA also has top-notch "aurora tutorial" hereMet Eireann’s forecast’s for clear skies, mild weather and near calm conditions, sky-rocketed my anticipation levels! As I couldn’t travel north to dark sky locations outside Dublin, I was determined to give my local observation spots in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown the best go possible. Here’s the story of my ethereal experiences that night - and how I took and processed my shots.

My Previous (much fainter!) Auroras

Before I get to that, although I missed the 10 May event, I previously saw auroras in Ireland as I wrote in two earlier blog posts – but nothing like this time! The first was near Port Beach in Co. Louth in December 2015. As I arrived, I was thrilled to see “shimmering green curtains”. Sadly, these disappeared quickly before I could get a proper shot but I did get images of dimmer displays later. I was lucky again in March 2016, this time from my home patch of Killiney Hill when I photographed green auroras arcing right across Dublin Bay, despite the bright street lights - you can get prints of both events here. Since then, I’ve tried a few times without much success, most recently on 13 September when I went back to my Killiney Hill spot . . . to find a bush is now partly blocking the view there!

Barely visible grey auroras, even to the camera, over Howth from Killiney Hill on 16 September 2024. Even after developing in Lightroom, the final image was still a blotchy mess. This shows how special the event of 10-11 October was!

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Shooting the Auroras on Killiney Hill

On 10 October, the last sunlight faded when astronomical twilight ended at 8:34pm. However, the half moon didn’t set until two hours later. So I got to Killiney Hill by about 9:15pm. By then, the setting Moon would be less bright than the suburban light pollution. As I made the short journey from my home village of Shankill, social media in general and my camera club’s WhatsApp group, Offshoot, were already oohing and aahing! I’d shared the aurora forecasts with them earlier. Maybe waiting until the Moon was low in the sky was a mistake, and I’d miss the show again! But the car park on Killiney Hill was jammers.  Clearly, there were a lot of aurora chasers out! I went up to my 2016 spot, despite the bush, to look north over Howth and I met fellow Offshoot member John Fitzpatrick, he’s KillineyHillPark on Instagram. There wasn’t much happening, so he suggested we move to the nearby communications tower. I was doubtful, as we would be looking north east rather than north. But, as we approached, we could hear excited voices in the darkness!

When we emerged from some bushes and looked up, I gasped. Huge red and green bands were now lighting up the north eastern sky from Dublin Bay to the communications tower and it was action stations to get the tripod and camera set up. At first, I tried my Sigma 30mm f1.4 to get as much light as possible but that lens was not wide enough to make a good composition there. Fighting panic in case the display disappeared, I switched to my Canon 10-16mm wide angle lens. The aperture is only f3.5 at the wide end but I knew the high ISO capabilities of my Canon R7 are very good, and with the new Denoise feature in Lightroom, I hoped I would get clean images.

With auroras from the horizon almost to the zenith, I went as wide as possible at 10mm – and used the wall separating us from the cliffs of the disused Dalkey Quary as a leading line. There were lots of people around, so I volunteered(😊) a few as foreground interest. The first was Diarmaid with his hat in the colours of my native Cork – sure you couldn’t get better than that, boy! As it happens, it wasn’t a Cork hat but a Cuala one, the local GAA club who have the same colours. Diarmaid held very still for the 20 second shoot and it was incredible to see green auroras high in the sky over the tower, as well as glowing red patches and another green band along the horizon (image 1). Never did I ever expect to see such bright auroras so high in Irish skies! You can also see the Seven Sisters star cluster over his head. The very bright “star” to his left is actually Jupiter! Five minutes later, along came Maria, capturing the aurora with her phone, so I made that part of her shot story (image 2). As you can see, the green band over the tower has disappeared but the reds, purples and blues are more intense as is the green band on the horizon. Later, I’ll write about how I processed my shots.

2. Maria capturing the Northern Lights at 10:32pm. See how the green patch over the tower has gone  (20s, f3.5, ISO 3200).

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Auroras over Dublin Bay from Coliemore Harbour

By 11pm, things were dying down on Killiney Hill and John had to leave but I’d been hearing that people were getting great views from nearby Sorrento Park so I thought about heading there and I checked Coliemore Harbour on Dalkey Sound on the way. At the harbour, there wasn’t much visible from the road with its bright street lights but I went down to a darker corner at the left hand side of the harbour wall. As my eyes dark adapted, again I saw large red and green bands draped between the sea and the high sky (image 3). This time, I was on my own basking in another astonishing auroral display! I was nearly overwhelmed watching glittering shafts reaching for the heavens - outshining even Jupiter! But, not so much that I stopped taking pictures! The shafts were followed by multicoloured curtains stretching along the horizon from north to east and also included Mars, Jupiter, Pleiades, the Plough and Orion as detailed in the shot captions (images 4-11).

3. Auroral curtains over the dark corner in Coliemore Harbour in Dalkey at 0:24am – including my camera bag! The Plough is above Howth Head (30s, f3.5, ISO 1600).

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4. Glittering auroral shafts rising from between the Kish (middle white light) and the Muglins Lights (right) behind the Dalkey Islands at 0:13am. Or, could this be a STEVE? The Seven Sisters are half way up just to the right and Jupiter is outshone in the brightest pink shaft! The twin bright stars, one above the other,  near the bottom left are Castor and Pollux of the Gemini constellation and the third bright “star” to the right of them is Mars. Orion's belt is rising to the right of the red Muglins light (20s, f3.5, ISO 1600).

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How the Camera sees the Auroras Differently from my Eyes

So how did I take and process these shots and were the colours really this bright? To take the last question first – no, not to my eyes, or anyone’s! Our eyes are not built to see colours well in low light – especially when light pollution stops full dark adaption. So, In fact, that’s the wrong question! Even without light pollution near the poles, aurora’s don’t look as bright as we see them in photographs (image 1a). This is described by travel blogger Kristin here, and in much more detail by photographer Ewen Bell, here. And, as an aside, check out the first auroral shot ever taken here!

But were the colours really there? Absolutely! And my task as the photographer is to use my camera and Lightroom skills (see processing images 1b-1e) to show them to you as best I can. In particular, a camera can collect auroral light over many seconds whereas your eyes only see what passes through from instant to instant. You wouldn’t ask that question of an astronomer or a microbiologist about their images of distant galaxies or microorganisms . .  . subjects that are totally invisible to your eyes but still real!

1a. The first shot with tonal edits showing it roughly as I saw it from memory,  although the reds were probably a bit more obvious on site.

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All the images were taken with a Canon EFS 10-22mm f3.5-4.5 lens attached to a Canon R7 with a Canon EF to R adapter but any modern DSLR or "Mirrorless" type camera is good. What's more important is a wide angle lens. If you don't have one, you could try taking a series of vertical images with the lens you do have and merge them into a panorama with Lightroom - just make sure that there is an overlap of about third of the frame between each shot.  My kit was mounted on a Manfrotto tripod with a 410 geared head for precise adjustment of the camera’s position. As the R7 is a cropped sensor camera, the field of view of the 10-22mm lens is equivalent to 16-26mm on a full frame camera, approximately.  Settings were usually 20 seconds, f3.5, ISO 1600 or 3200, and at 10mm except where otherwise noted in the image captions.

If you don't have a big camera, nowadays, modern mobile phones less than two or three years old can also take very good auroral images, and your phone camera can see colour when you cannot. You'll need a mini-tripod to keep it steady, or failing that, stabilize it as best you can on something solid. Use voice control to "Shoot" as well, if you phone has it. There are lots of guides to auroral smartphone photography and apps - two are here & here. However, to get high quality images from you phone, you'll need get into the nerdy manual shooting settings and, if your phone allows it, shoot raw images to develop in Lightroom later  - see below.

5. A vertical view of red and green auroral curtains over the Kish Light (right) with Jupiter at right at 0:27am. Again, Castor, Pollux and Mars form an “L” low down. (30s, f3.5, ISO 1600).

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6. The same scene just two minutes later at 0:29am showing how quickly the displays change  (15s, f3.5, ISO 1600).

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Developing my Auroral Images

Once the shots are taken, I develop them in Adobe’s Lightroom – the desktop classic version. As with these auroral images, when I take shots that will need work to develop, I always shoot in raw image format, The camera saves raw images as unprocessed digital data and does not convert them to JPEG’s that are much harder to edit later. Unprocessed raw images are often called digital negatives – by analogy with film negatives. Nineteenth and twentieth century photographers, such as Ansel Adams,  applied many analogue enhancement techniques when making prints from their negatives.

As you can see from the first communications tower image as taken in the camera (image 1a, above),  as well as the colours being washed out (image 1b), the tower is falling back a lot because I was using a wide angle lens, made worse by shooting from a slightly lower position. I corrected this in Lightroom using about a -80  vertical transform, some levelling (image 1c)  – and then checked the constrain crop box to eliminate the white areas (image 1d). This has the effects of stretching the stars a little, especially at the upper corners. The later images from the harbour didn’t need such a transform but I found the built in electronic level on my R7 wasn’t as accurate as I expected in some of my early images. In the dark and the auroral exhilaration, I didn’t notice the sloping horizon but again I was able to correct it in Lightroom afterwards. Later in the shoot, I added a hot shoe mounted spirit level to double check.

1b-d. The raw file of the first image as imported from my camera in Lightroom with no edits, followed by transforming to correct for the tower falling back because it was shot at a wide angle, and lastly, the transformed image with the constrain crop option applied. See how noisy these are compared to the final images.

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After the images were squared up, I set the white balance to auto, and then used the tonal sliders in the Basic panel, to set exposure, contrast, darks and lights to roughly bring out the colours. Next, I used Lightroom’s AI powered Denoise tool in the Detail panel. Whoa you say – AI?? Isn’t that for making fake photos? Just as Meta did recently by suggesting that if you missed the auroras, you could simply fake them with AI! While Meta’s images may be art . . .  they’re definitely not photographs! The Denoise tool, however, is something quite different. It’s not adding stuff that was never there. Instead, it’s removing something in your image, digital noise,  that was NOT in the scene. And, the high ISO and long exposure settings used for astrophotography makes digital camera electronics more prone to generating this noise that significantly degrades quality. In short, AI Denoise is not faking something into your image, it’s removing digital capture artefacts that have nothing to do with reality. Once the Denoising was done, I fine tuned the tones and then added Dehaze up to +47 (in the +30’s for the Coliemore images). This is much more Dehaze than I’ve ever used before but it really worked to bring out the auroral colours (image 1e).

1e. The first image showing final tonal and detail edits.

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I did not remove anything from the images as shown here in this blog post, such as ships’ lights on the horizon and the aircraft light trails around Dublin Airport some 15km to the northwest, because they were part of the story of the night for this post. However, I did take out transient plane & ship lights for the prints and downloads here – along with my camera bag! But, I've left in the lighthouses.

7. A horizontal view of red and green auroral curtains over the Kish & Muglins Lights with the Seven Sisters and Jupiter, and Orion’s belt at the bottom right at 0:26am (30 & 15s, f3.5, ISO 1600).

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8. Intense red aurora at 0:33am over Howth and the Kish Light and the L of Castor Pollux and Mars is to the right, low down. Part of the Plough is visible to the left (15s, f3.5 & ISO1600). Getting so much red is really rare at out latitude - check out this excellent explanation for the different colours.

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9. An intense patch of colour near the horizon at 0:44am over Castor, Pollux and Mars, with Jupiter, the Seven Sisters, and most of Orion at the bottom right (15s, f3.5, ISO 1600). 009-Aurora-Killiney-Aurora-©-2024-John-Coveney009-Aurora-Killiney-Aurora-©-2024-John-Coveney

 

10. Red and green auroras and the Plough over Howth and the Maidens Rock at 1:24 as the magnetic storm was weakening a bit (20s, f4.5, ISO 2500 at 22mm). 010-Aurora-Killiney-Aurora-©-2024-John-Coveney010-Aurora-Killiney-Aurora-©-2024-John-Coveney

Conclusion

So that’s the story of my most recent encounter with the, for once, not so Northern Lights, and my best by a long way! I hope these images of the Aurora Borealis are worthy of the deities of the dawn and the cold north wind, whose names Galileo used to characterise these beautiful geomagnetic displays.

11. And finally, some lunatic trying to call home at 1:46am after the red auroras disappeared (20s, f3.5, ISO 1600).

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