Back in 1981 I was working at a timber mill in Oulu, Northern Finland. It was mid December, the sun would stagger above the horizon about 10.30am and be gone again by three, it was at least -20°C, a metre of level snow everywhere, roads of sheet ice so I looked forward to each night hoping to see the Northern Lights! All I ever got was a thin layer of greyish white auroral cloud drifting slowly overhead but one night I spotted a faint auroral curtain through my north facing hotel window. I actually had a Pentax SLR at the time but for some reason it contained a roll of B&W film My red and green colour perception is not good on faint colours so was unable to determine if indeed there was any colour in the display. However I managed to capture a shot through the triple glazed window!

The best display I have ever seen was actually back at home in semi-rural Leicestershire on March 30th. 1989 around midnight. I had been alerted to the possibility by picking up radio signals reflected off the aurora and it was a most impressive event, the whole sky full of colour even for me and despite a high level of light pollution. Needless to say, I was so overwhelmed I never even thought of taking a photograph Anybody else witness this event?

Currently we are at a sunspot minimum but as solar activity increases over the next few years we may be in for a good one again at UK latitudes, hopefully like those photos in The Telegraph

One very minor point Brian is that the young lady in the last of your fashion images is about to fall off the settee

I'll get with it one day

Ah ha! Hit F11 'Full screen' and now works OK on my 19" 1440x900 widescreen desktop monitor but no go on my Acer Netbook with its 1024x600 resolution. However, on my Linux box running Firefox and a 1280x1024 display, no problem.

I have the spotty frock with a sunset background, flash and Java both installed and up to date. The only link visible is the T&Cs. It all worked before OK.

BTW Cleared cache and 'Page Source' in FF shows this:
http://www.bjlawson.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index.html

What's happened? All I get now is a pic of a girl in a spotty frock and nothing else That's in FF and IE.

I noticed when downloading the update for Pentax Photo Browser/Lab that the minimum RAM requirement is 1GB with a recommendation of 2GB. Processor of 2GHZ so mine falls a little short. Perhaps some over-clocking is called for

I use this link

Thanks Matt. My RAW image was 11.8Meg and the resulting JPG was 8.6. Be interested to see your comments.

BTW: The image in question is the bottom one on my website.

40 seconds to save an edited raw image as the highest quality jpg.