David Malin Awards: Matt Davis’s aurora shot
Matt Davis positioned himself in a cave to frame himself in this amazing aurora shot from the David Malin Awards.
For aurora chasers around the world, the solar storms of mid-May 2024 were a gift: for three consecutive nights the sky lit up as charged particles streaming from the Sun collided with our atmosphere, exciting the gas molecules and causing them to glow. Down in Hobart, Matt Davis saw the buzz building on social media and headed out to a spot he knows well from previous astrophotography trips: a cave in the city’s south that’s accessible on foot, with a little rock-hopping involved. He positioned his camera inside the cave and stood at the entrance, taking in the spectacle, for this wonderful image – a finalist in the David Malin Awards.
Davis, 40, has worked for the Tasmania Fire Service in Hobart for the past 15 years. As well as being a firefighter he’s an instructor, teaching recruits about how fire behaves and how buildings burn. (He has a YouTube channel devoted to the science of fire, too, where you’ll find videos with titles such as “An introduction to backdraft” and “Ember attack: the threat beyond the firefront”, aimed at the lay person. “Making videos is a hobby, and I hope they’re useful to people,” he says.)
He captured this self-portrait with a six-second exposure on May 11, but most of that night he put his camera down and just enjoyed the show, far from the traffic jams of city folk flocking to a viewing spot. “I’d never seen anything like it – lights were dancing and pulsing across the sky, with big beams of light coming up from the south,” he says. These days, with two infant daughters (one of whom was born last month), astrophotography suits Davis down to the ground. He says, with a practicality that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s been a parent of infants, “It’s something I can do when they’re asleep.”