- Technical information -

What kind of camera body, what kind of objective, how long exposure times etc. At the moment I use the following setup:

Technically good camera body, which doesn't mind about cold temperatures. Some people say that mechanical camera can be used, but at least I've been very satisfied with my Canons. If I remember correct, the coldest temperature where I've been photographing was around - 35 degrees Celsius. Certainly it takes batteries but as long as you keep second battery warm, You don't have problems. I would like to have EOS 3 or new EOS 1V, which doesn't consume batteries while exposing, but maybe some day... 

Objective should be a one with fixed focal length and large aperture. Normally I use 35 mm f/2 wide angle lens, which is more or less a good one.  I had a chance to try 24 mm f/2.8 lens. Although the aperture was not good enough, I could finally fit the auroral forms totally into one picture. January 2001 I managed to get the ultimate lens for auroral photographing: 24 mm lf/1.4. Yes, it's expensive but the field-of-view, aperture, and sharpness are worth of every marks I spended! Zoom can also be used, but be careful with focusing; sometimes infinity is not infinity! I suggest that you check where your objectives focus is in infinity and then use some kind of insulating tape to fix that- and actually this goes for all the lenses!. It's cold and dark and you can very easily get carried away because of beautiful auroras (or because of polar bears, like happened to me at Svalbard) and you are not able to think all the details anymore... :)

And of course a good tripod! Exposure times are long, it has to be very stable, but it also have to very easy and quick to aim into a new direction! I'm very satisfied to my Slik, which is also almost 2 m long. And that's a good quality in thick snow!

And film? For F/1,4 lens at least 200 ASA, for F/2lens 400 ASA and for F/4lens  800 ASA... This way you can keep the exposure times under 30 seconds. With longer times stars starts to draw lines and auroras get very blurry. Myself I use Fuji slide films (currently Provia 100F and Provia 400F), but you should get also good results with other films. Some films don't "like" long exposure times and colors start to get ugly. You should be able to find comments of other photographers from web.