The first Aurorawebcam.com site came online in the fall of 2003. After a short time the site was redesigned with the help of Stachu Strzyżewski from Poland. The latest redesign is to update the site’s appearance and give it new features to serve the amount of traffic we receive. Some of these new features include a dedicated webcam server, calendar of events, daytime camera that is back online, upgraded member’s forum, and improved live chat. Also upgrades are being made to streamline the website allowing me more time to respond to E-mails and go out and take some photos.

My name is Troy Birdsall. I'm 24 years old and I live on Mt. Aurora just north of Fairbanks Alaska.
I started photographing the aurora when people began coming to the ski lodge that my family runs to view the aurora. I was about 13 years old when I started printing my first photos. Which were taken with my dad’s old Canon AE-1 camera and a 50mm F1.8 lens. The next season I had my photos scanned and was selling CD’s with a few of my original photos on them. Soon after that I came up with the idea to take peoples photos with the aurora. So I went out and bought an Olympus E-10 digital camera, began taking peoples photos with the aurora and printing them off on a HP printer.

My sophomore year in high school my father and I came up with the aurora webcam idea. Since then the aurorawebcam.com project has been one of my main hobbies. A few of my other hobbies are computer/ video games, photography, and computers.

As of now I still have a day job. Or two or three… Just to name a few of my day jobs in the winter time, I work my normal day job as a IBEW Lineman apprentice, help my family’s hotel (Mt. Aurora Fairbanks Creek Lodge), help at my family’s ski area, and work nights at the ski lodge making coffee and taking photos of the aurora. In the summer I only work for the IBEW though most of the time we work 60 hours a week.

Someday in the future I would like to quit my day job and become a full time photographer.