This is an image I’ve been holding onto for far too long, mainly because it resembles a very special experience.
I shot this panorama on an overnight trip to Plateau hut with a group of friends, in November last year.
Miraculously, the weather for both days was immaculate, which allowed us a decent amount of time to explore the Grand Plateau & Glacier Dome.
We had discussed the possibility of going out for some astrophotography at night, but that wasn’t the purpose of the trip by any means.
In the evening we listened to the weather call come through on the hut radio.
It was mentioned that there was the likelihood of an aurora display that night, so after dinner we wandered back outside the hut to see what was happening.
To this day I think this has to have been the most impressive display of the southern lights I’ve seen.
Not to mention the incredible perspective we had, from high up in the mountains, across from the two tallest peaks in New Zealand.
In the image to the left of center is Plateau hut, a well equipped back country hut, situated on a rock outcrop and cantilevered into oblivion, almost as if dangling over the monstrous Hochstetter glacier.
Centre frame are ANZAC peaks, rising to around 2500masl, just beyond the gaping crevasses of Hochstetter glacier.
The peak in the right portion of the image is none other than Aoraki/ Mount Cook, the tallest mountain in NZ, it’s high peak reaching 3724masl.
The east face of Mount Cook Just obscures the central core of our Milky-Way galaxy as it set’s in the west.
The colourful beams of the Aurora Australis line the sky like a curtain from east to west as solar particles interact with the earth’s magnetic field in the highest section of earth’s atmosphere known as the Thermosphere.
Far left & right, at the most eastern and western edges of the Aurora is S.T.E.V.E, (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), a rarely seen form of aurora, usually only witnessed during high intensity geomagnetic storms. The beams are made of super heated plasma particles (Upward of 3000°c) travelling from east to west at around 6km per second.
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