Thank you for this beautiful start to my day! Photographing the northern lights has been on my bucket list for so long I never stopped to consider there may also be southern lights! I visited Australia several years ago and have had a long time desire to return. If I do, hopefully I can catch this! I know here in North America there's s northern lights "season". Is it the same for you guys? Thanks also for the camera settings!
There are no real seasons for the Northern and Southern lights in the true sense that the sun is always there and potentially active. You do obviously need darkness to see the lights so the reason they call late Autumn and early Winter the season here in the North is that the darkest day of the year is obviously the solstice (last day of Autumn/first day of Winter); so with more hours of darkness you have more chance of seeing something. In summer in the North if your close enough to the arctic circle there can be permanent light which makes it impossible. Australia and NZ is a little different in that you are a long way North of the South pole; so you are seeing it from say 42 South in Tasmania to 46 South at the bottom of NZ. So you're looking at it from a long way away; however the southern ocean has very clean air with no particulate emissions as there is drifting North from Europe and is very very dark as there is no light pollution. Because of this you normally see photos of a lot more red / pink in the South as you are looking at high altitude aurora that is a long way away; so never overhead (ok well once every 10 years perhaps you get KP9/10 and overhead) . In the North you can get up to 55-65 Deg North quite easily (Iceland/Greenland/Scandinavia/Canada) so you see a lot more close range and overhead green aurora down as low as KP 3-5 but its becomes harder to see the red as its 500km above your head and gets washed out by the green unless its a really strong aurora. You obviously can see overhead aurora frequently if you sail down to a similar latitude in the South to that which Iceland/Scandinavia sit in the North. But there is almost nothing down there bar some small antarctic islands or Antarctica itself. But thats quite a difficult and expensive thing to organize. The southern tip of South America is also a long way South; but its on the wrong side of the magnetic pole so you cant see it from there well (just like you cant see it from Japan or Eastern Russia as the magnetic pole is offset from the physical pole towards Iceland in the North and NZ/Australia in the South)
Thank you so much for your thorough and thoughtful answer! When I asked I was not expecting such a great response. You've really done your research. Thank you for sharing this with me!
What an awesome explanation. I never really knew any of this about the Southern lights.
I think that reply was longer than the actual post lol!
Thank you I appreciate it!