We arrived at our hotel in Luosto about 2000 local time, just in time for dinner. At registration we were issued with Aurora alarms; we had hardly finished dinner when they went off. There hadn't even been time to issue us with the warm clothing we had been promised. Fortunately we had all brought some warm clothing with us and we hurriedly donned it all and went outside to the nearest place with a view to the east. The first picture below is the first I have ever taken of the Aurora, so I had very little idea of what I was doing. I used my Canon 1100D camera fitted with its native 18-55mm lens set at 18mm. Full manual mode, 30 seconds exposure at f3.5. Manual focusing is always difficult, I find, as the stars don't tend to be visible in the viewfinder or on a preview screen. Sadly in my excitement I didn't get it very well focused this first night and I have had to use Focus Magic to correct it in post-processing; it does a good but not a perfect job of correcting out-of-focus blur. The first picture, below, was the very first I took. We had hurried to the nearest place with a good view. The trees in the foreground make for a pretty picture. They are lit by the local sodium street lights. For a place that advertises itself as the aurora capital of the area, the light pollution is quite horrendous (but more of that later). We quickly moved on to a frozen lake where we got clearer views away from the worst of the lights. The pictures below were taken between 21:16 and 22:17 local time.
