Timelapse: “Celestial Lights – viewed from Earth”

Photo and video artist Ole C. Salomonsen assembled over 150,000 digital photos taken over the course of eight months to create this stunning time-lapse video of aurora-filled Arctic skies. The footage was shot on location in parts of Norway, Finland and Sweden from September 2011 to April 2012, and shows the glorious effects that the Sun’s increasing activity has had on our planet’s upper atmosphere.

If you have access to proper audio hardware, please connect and turn up the volume to enjoy the fantastic music composed by Norwegian composer Kai-Anders Ryan.

The video is a merge of two parts; the first part contains some more wild and aggressive auroras, as well as a few Milky Way sequences, hence either auroras are moving fast because they are or they are fast due to motion of the Milky Way / stars. Still, some of the straight-up shots are very close to real-time speed — although auroras mostly are slower, she can also be fast! The second part has some more slow and majestic auroras, where author has focused more on composition and foreground.

You can follow Ole’s work on Facebook at facebook.com/arcticlightphoto, and check out his website here.