Waiting for Auroras

I’m going to admit that my Alaskan cruise was not the sunniest cruise in the world.  Majority of the time, it was overcast and raining so there wasn’t much opportunity to take awesome photographs of the towering mountains and such.

Our day at Ketchikan, Alaska, however, was much better.  Now, the Ketchikan rain festival runs from early September to late August so it was quite ironic that our one sunny day in Alaska was there.  Also, our “naturalist”  (at least, that’s what she called herself) forecast that there would be auroras at night, rating the chance of seeing auroras as “extreme” and that they would be visible even this far south.  So I felt that I was in for an awesome treat.  Beautiful sunset paired with auroras in the evening made me think that this would be the climax of the cruise in terms of opportunities for photography.

So I went out onto the upper decks and braved the wind to take photographs of the sunset.  There was some cloud cover so I was hoping to see some “God Rays” pushing through and around the clouds.  So I went about taking photographs while losing all sensation in my hands due to the cold.

Then night time fell.  My senses were tingling.  I wanted to see Auroras.  It, however, was getting much too cold so I retreated into the upper buffet and waited for any announcement by the “naturalist” for Auroras.  I waited while reading the book that I had brought along with me.  Then I waited some more.  Then I decided that I would have an ice cream since it was on 24 hours a day.  Then I waited a bit longer.

Finally.  At the stroke of midnight, as if by design, I decided that I would go to sleep.  It turns out, that the auroras, if they did happen, were not visible as I had asked around whether or not anyone had seen them.  The talk of the day was that the auroras never showed.  So I felt that it wasn’t really worth my time staying up late for the auroras.  Maybe I’ll see them next time, but for now, please enjoy this beautiful sunset photograph that I had taken before my long and fruitless wait.

Notes:
Taken with Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi.
Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM at 28mm.
Shutter Speed:  1/200s.
Aperture: f/11.0
ISO 100.
Edited with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

24 Aug This entry was published on August 24, 2011 at 8:06 pm. It’s filed under DSLR Photography and tagged Alaska, cruise, islands, Ketchikan, landscape, mountains, photography, postaday2011, seascape, sunset. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.