Photography – The Coddiwomple Chronicles

It’s been a long 5 months waiting for the return of the Adelie Penguins to East Antarctica, and in particular to Shirley Island.

Why Shirley Island you might ask? Well, that’s the penguin rookery closest to Casey Station (my current home) and the location where I’m most able to visit on a regular basis.

It’s been so quiet without them, actually without any living beings other than myself and the 25 other expeditions here for the winter… but soon they’ll return bringing life back to our ice covered existence. Stealing stones to make nests for their mates, meeting up with their partner after months of swimming in the southern ocean’s cold waters fattening up on krill to get them through the long months sitting on their eggs, getting muddy and impatient with hanging around their rookery when they could be out swimming with their mates, and generally being most entertaining.

It can’t be long now… a month or so then they’ll return to us.

Then before long, it will be us leaving them. Our turn to travel north and return to warmer climes. I wonder if they’ll miss us like we miss them.

What is is about the Aurora that makes us so awestruck? It’s not really that magnificent a site without the aid of a good camera and a little editing… more a hazy pale green waft that could be cloud or could be fog, or could it be that we’re lucky enough to be in the presence of the dancing waves of solar activity, mixed with ions in the atmosphere and the earths magnetic field that creates the mystical Aurora. The Southern Lights!

This week we were lucky enough to have clear skies and a beautiful Aurora which danced above us here at Casey Station. A quick bolt in a Hagglunds away from the bright lights of station and we were blessed with the best show we’ve seen yet. (Usually we get a bright green Aurora off in the distance on the horizon; but on Thursday night it danced directly above us, mixing it up with the Milky Way and a few satellites and shooting stars.)

What a show.