Late in the evening of the 30th April after it finally got dark, I set up on the Aft (back) deck to see if I could capture any aurora. I had checked Spaceceather.com to see where the aurora oval was and from the diagram it was not looking very promising from my location.
We left Skagway late at 8pm and were cruising in very calm waters, I tried to take some picture of where I thought they would be but no such luck, it didn’t help that I was complexly bamboozled by the direction we were going in and the different constellations that I was not use to seeing as I’m a southern hemisphere girl ;-)
I did have my Stellarium app thank goodness, to show where the northern sky was and to my relief I could see the Andromeda galaxy in my pictures so I knew I was shooting in the right direction!
I was also keeping an eye on the strength of the Aurora Oval (NOAA) that is freely available on Spaceweather.com. As you can see from the chart below the aurora forecast was not very strong but I could see from our ships position that we may have a small chance of seeing them on the northern horizon.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast
https://spaceweather.com/
At times, they became quite active but I had a few issues to deal with mainly the movement of the ship and the smoke coming from the ships funnel, I continued to take photos until about 2am when they seemed to just die off. By that time it was very very cold, but it didn’t matter I got my pictures!
Yay…I got the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) on my Alaskan cruise : - )