A few photos from the Aurora Australis event on Wednesday 12th November 2025. I had been getting a few aurora alerts on my email leading up to Wedndsday night, so I was aware that there might be a good display if the weather played nice. Wednesday in the Blue Mountains was a beautiful cloudless day so in the early evening I actually started to check in earnest to see if there was a good chance for the aurora that night. By 7.30pm all the information pointed to a good chance, so I pack some gear and headed of for the long 1 minute drive from my home portrait studio down the road to Echo Point in Katoomba.

Upon arrival I could see a few people hustling down to the main lookout with tripod in hand eagerly squinting like myself to see if there was any colour in the sky over the jamison valley. Often it’s very hard to see the aurora with the naked eye and it actually isn’t visiable until you capture it with a camera. As I was up my camera on the tripod, a tour guide told me that he had about 25 guests who were going to share the space where I was a part of a star gazing tour. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes later when he look at the images I was capturing, when he excitedly exclaimed, “Oh wait…are you here for an aurora?”. I couldn’t help but give a cheeeky grin and say, “Yep, I thought you guts were too…”, we both laughed and then over the course of the next couple of hours I had a steady stream of onlookers behind me waiting for the long exposures to finish so they could see the aurora on my screen.

Echo point isn’t a great location for getting aurora images or night time images in general, due to the amount of light in the area. The iconic 3 sister landmark are floodlit each night from the lookouts, which causes allot of what photographers call, “light pollution”, to enter your camera. I wasn’t too fussed really as I was generally just looking to get some snaps of the event and not take it too seriously as a photographer. After a while I decided to call it quits as it was getting pretty busy and onlookers phone camera flashes were starting to become a problem with my longish exposures…Anyway here is a few photos, nothing amazing, but it was nice to be able to quickly share some of the images online for people to get an idea of what a camera can capture during these events…

Thanks for having a look and I hope you get to see the aurora soon….

Ben Pearse is a Blue Mountains photographer specialising in portrait, headshot and commercial photography. Ben works from his home based portrait studio in Katoomba. Website