A New Zealand photographer has upended the competition in the 2021 Northern Lights Photographer of the Year Award with his stunning photos of the Aurora Australis.
In its fifth year, the annual awards is held every December to inspire more astro photographers to go looking for the aurora.
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Auckland based photographer Larryn Rae took the stunning photo of the lights over Tekapo by chance.
"I was on a photography trip when aurora alerts began popping up on my phone, so we started searching for a unique place to shoot them from. We ended up at this lakeside location, and as soon as the sunset faded and dusk fell, we could already see the colour and shape of the aurora happening," he said.
With an extended aurora visible with the naked eye and for hours, Rae called it "one of the best displays I have seen for years."
Rae's photo is just one of two of the Australis, with David Oldenhof's photograph from Tasmania also being shortlisted.
"We always want to have a variety of the best Aurora images captured around the world," said judge and editor Dan Zafra.
"The Aurora Australis is not as well known as the Aurora Borealis, so I believe that it's a good way to share the beauty of this phenomenon in areas that are not the typical "Northern Lights destinations."
In its fifth edition, the competition has seen submissions of southern Aurora pictures from places as exotic as Antarctica. However, pictures from the Northern Hemisphere are far more plentiful.
"Finding quality pictures of the Southern Lights is much more difficult than the images of their northern counterpart," says Zafra.
He says this is mostly because there are fewer people living in the Southern Hemisphere at a latitude to see the lights, but also because of the remoteness.
"In all these places, you need a considerable solar storm to see the lights, which typically happens only a few times a year. Also, the weather has to cooperate since some of these places are usually prone to humidity and overcast skies."
The shortlisted Northern Lights were equally brilliant. A haunting frozen ghost-ship in the Siberian district of Murmansk was one of the contenders.
"The temperature was 34 degrees below zero, but flames like these make you forget the temperature," said Russian photographer Aleksy R.
Norway was the setting of four of the Aurora photos including a spectacular image titled "Northern Lights cathedral" by Frøydis Dalheim.
The tiny town of Senja next to the fiords helped portray the scale of the display, showing "snow-capped landscapes, spectacular mountains, and a dancing aurora that coloured everything green."
However it was Iceland that saw the most submissions. With five images from the island in the North Atlantic, one even included the glow of an erupting volcano.
"I couldn't believe my luck!" said Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove was able to capture the lights above the Geldingadalir eruption. The volcano which had been dormant for 800 years began emitting lava in March during a five month sequence of eruptions.
"I was thinking a lot about whether it would be possible to photograph the aurora above the eruption."
The competition praised the "unique image" of the Fagradalsfjall volcano, saying that it was perfect for the brief, asking for "new talents and for new locations where the Northern Lights haven't been photographed before".
