Sally Edwards’ picture of Lake Boomanjin on Fraser Island in Queensland was a top five finalist in the Canon Collective’s 2022 Clique Awards.
Aurora-chasers have had a wonderful time since mid-March as solar wind from the sun struck the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering pulsing waves of pink and green light – the amazing southern aurora. Photographers usually have to travel to Tasmania to view the phenomenon, but this autumn they’ve captured spectacular shots from the mainland’s southern coast – including at Flinders and Rye.
Sally Edwards’ photo of The Dragon’s Head at Rye with the southern aurora was taken in late March. For the technically minded, she used a Canon 6D Mark II, Sigma art series 24mm lens on f1.4 with a 61-second exposure on ISO 1000.
Several aurora nights in March were the biggest and brightest in years – and there could be more to come. Turbocharging the solar wind have been coronal mass ejections from the sun, the strongest for 11 years. CMEs are accompanied by magnetic disturbances that affect the Earth’s geomagnetic field, triggering vibrant displays of northern and southern lights, aka aurora borealis and aurora australis. ‘Borealis’ is Latin for ‘northern’; ‘australis’ is Latin for ‘southern’.
This aurora photo was taken on March 24 at The Dragon’s Head rock formation at Rye’s Number Sixteen Beach by hobby photographer Sally Edwards during an all-night vigil. Sally fell in love with the Peninsula as a youngster and spends many of her off-work hours taking photos of the area’s amazing land and seascapes – piers and jetties, rocks and beaches at sunrise and sunset. She was given an Instamatic camera at age 10 and later learnt to use an SLR, the best basic camera of the time. Now, of course, it’s all digital.
Sally’s had such a good reaction to her latest aurora photos that she hopes to start selling prints. She’s been posting the best ones on Instagram for two years.
Sally recently discovered photography group tours and joined one to K’Gari (Fraser Island) in 2022 organised through the Australian Photographic Society. She is going to the Flinders Ranges soon. Her passion for photography recently led her to Warrnambool to attend a seminar with her photography hero, world-renowned Australian landscape photographer Ken Duncan.
Meanwhile, Sally and other aurora watchers are waiting for the moon to disappear, logging on to the Aurora Tasmania Facebook page, and checking one of the world’s best aurora alert websites: aurora-alerts.uk
Readers can follow Sally on Instagram at #sephotosaus
Fraser Island Dingo.
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