I quickly set up my camera and tripod when I saw a break in the clouds that lasted just long enough to take my first images of this huge sunspot that produced that CME causing all those incredible aurora’s worldwide!
 
We are too far south here on the Gold Coast at 28’ S latitude to see any of those stunning aurora, but that didn’t stop me from getting up at 3am this morning to try and capture something.
 
I did capture a weird purple colouring in the sky looking to the south, you can even see the Southern Cross and pointers going down in the south west, so maybe there was some atmospheric phenomenon happening up there in the sky to produce that strange colour!
 
Solar Images captured with a Canon 70D camera and a Canon 100-400mm lens with 2x teleconverter attached, making a focal length of 1280mm. Exposures were 1/500th second and ISO200, 20 images stacked in Registak6 and processed in PS.
 
The 3am sky images captured with Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 11-16mm lens at f2.8, ISO800 and 20-second exposures.

~ Strange purple background colour in the sky ~

On our Holland America cruise ship called the Koningsdam, we did a spectacular trip up the inside passage to view the magnificent glaciers. I was determined to try and capture the northern lights while we were there and the town of Skagway was the most northern point of our night-time journey at latitude 59.45’ North.
 
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/