FAR ROCK LIGHTS

I think of all my aurora images, and there are many more that still haven’t seen the light of day, “Far Rock Lights” is my favourite.  It’s called that because the rocks in the foreground are as far out into the Moray Firth as it’s possible to get with dry feet. The Moray Firth by-the-way is a major inlet of the North Sea in the North-East of Scotland next to which Lossiemouth, the former fishing town where I live, stands. 

Protruding about two hundred metres out in tio the firth these rocks are not all that easy to get to and only at low tide. At high tide they’re well under water so it’s important to know the tide times because you can easily get cut off by the tide sneaking in behind you, particularly at night when you can’t actually see it. 

And of-course - as I have learned to my cost on a number of occasions -  the tide and the aurora don’t co-ordinate with each other. Fortunately, the water on this night was reasonably calm with light winds so the tide wasn’t washing over the spot where I was standing, but it was coming in and it was starting to look as if the forecast of a Kp6 auroral storm was wrong, though as can be seen in the image below, the northern horizon had started to show a little colour. 

However, with the aurora being nothing particularly spectacular and the tide coming in, after waiting as long as I thought was wise, and downing a couple of coffees and a sandwich - during which time the aurora had actually died down - I decided to admit defeat.  It was properly dark by now and I’d gone maybe fifty paces... when the aurora went mad! There’s a Lowland Scots English word for loosing your cool, it’s called “ranting”, and I was doing rather a lot of it as I headed back to where I’d been.  By the time I was set up it was getting a bit hairy so I didn’t bother “light painting” the rocks, which on reflection was probably a good thing in this case since the dark rocks stand out nicely against the reflection of the aurora which would have been washed out by the unavoidable overspill of light on the water. Unfortunately, though,  i couldn’t hang around. The aurora didn’t really do anything else as I made my escape, so at least I didn’t miss much – as I have on other occasions. 

As it turned out - since it was a gentle swell - the trip back turned out not to be all that dramatic, though I did have to jump over the gully you can see below instead of walking across where I was standing for this photo that I took on different day. Luckily the rocks here are covered in barnacles from being under water for so much of the time (all of what you can see gets submerged) so they’re quite grippy. With a heavy bergen backpack that jump would have been a nightmare otherwise. 

So, this night things fell into place, and I didn’t fall in any water. I’ve been to this spot many times, day and night, without success (the image below being an exception and taken on a different day) and had there been a bigger swell, if it had been cloudy or if one of my injuries had taken me out of the game “Far Rock Lights” would have been impossible and is an example of how much has to fall into place to get all the elements to line up for a good image. As a result of needing things to line up it’s been a glacially slow process getting my night sky images out in the public domain. If anybody had told me nearly fifteen years ago that I would “only just” be putting stuff out there I’d have laughed at them. I can’t believe so much time has flown by. I must be enjoying myself!