Recently I spent five weeks travelling through Europe, the first week of the trip was spent in Norway, first Oslo, then Tromsų to hunt some aurora. Spotted some, the first image here is a photo of a relatively weak aurora shot at ISO 100 (should have shot at a higher ISO, but I was in the middle of a star trail photo).
The second image is a star trail taken while keeping the eyes peeled for more activity.
Both shot with a Canon EOS 5DMKII and a 24-70mm lens.
I knew that to shoot aurora's you should be at a higher ISO (e.g. 1600) and a shorter shutter time, but the first night we weren't having any luck, with any aurora spotted being extremely faint, so mostly I decided to shoot some star trails. It was also a full moon the nights we went out to look, so avoiding the inevitable foreground blow-out was important too.
I could have taken more shorter exposures & stacked them, but I was quite happy with these at the time.
I definitely want to go back - Norway is such a beautiful country & the people are just awesome.
Thanks for the comments, much appreciated.
The yellow light in both of these photos is either a car passing in the distance or a small number of houses that weren't visible at the location (I don't even know exactly where these photos were taken, I was rather location displaced the night we went out).
I can highly recommend visiting Tromsų, it's a lovely & interesting city/town, but the real beauty of it is how easy it is to get away from light pollution & into dark skies.
Also being from a country where the majority of the population has never seen snow, it was a real buzz to experience the cold & snow.
