Questions about photographing the aurora borealis with a Nikon D80

1. You're fine
2. Cold temps drop the voltage of your battery without really effecting the charge. Once a battery gets too cold, it won't run the camera. Keep one warm and switch as needed
3. If you have a camera bag, zip everything up and simply bring the bag inside. Let it acclimate for a couple of hours. If you are really paranoid, you have to bag everything
4. Make sure you test it. However, even if it fails in the field, you still have the self timer.
5. Depends on the brightness of the lights and the composition you are going for. Be creative and have fun. You do have an LCD to check how things are going. Just as a note, if you are using shutter speeds between ~1/10 and 2 sec, you may benefit from using the mirror pre-release to avoid mirror-induced vobration

Pretty much everything Craig said...

(link)

Good article, the only time I got to photograph the aurora, it wasn't really a great night for it, and I STILL got results I like...

Wow, seeing -27 deg F in Kiruna, as I read this. That's cold even by Minnesota standards!

Good advice above. I'd err on the sake of being overly cautius, putting the camera and lenses in Zip-Locs and allowing them to acclimate before opening.

Be sure to share your results here.

Are you sure the D80 can use a 16Gb SDHC card?

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Once you are outside, lens cleaner won't be much use. Better to leave in your auto - truck - or room.
Practice on getting a focus point (Infinity...) with the zoom before you go into the night. In darkness, the lens may not focus well. A old manual focus 28mm or 35mm might do better...you can set the lens to Infinity and be done with it.

Battery power, in extreme cold, will decrease due to drop in voltage. Be prepared to put a battery in a inside pocket for a couple of minutes, and then put it into the camera. I can't say how well you take cold weather but finger-tips at -25º F and below get tender...and you need a bare finger to get into the battery change sequence.

With noise reduction on, a 30-second exposure will require the camera to go into a 30-second pause while the noise reduction is done to your image. **Should your battery give up on the noise-reduction part, you will lose your image's chance at in-camera noise reduction.** If the night sky has enough light, you may try 15-second exposures and that will take less time between your shots.

[...I manged a three+-year tour in central Alaska, 1984 to 1987, so, yes, I have been in some cold weather. Used film back then, not a digital camera.]

Andy: What everyone else said, PLUS ... try some breathing exercises, and see how hard it is to NOT BREATHE on the camera ... condensation starts and you are done for the evening.

I live in Northern Canada (Whitehorse, Yukon) - I'm definitely prone to a less then cautious approach, but I've been out with a d80 when its 20 or 30 below and had no battery issues (definitely keep your spare in your pocket!). I usually keep the camera in my coat when not in use at these temps, but that's about all the precautions I take. I've camped out, leaving the camera in my tent at the same temps and its been fine as well. Don't freak out when your LCD starts to act strangely - really slow to change, etc.

I've also never tried the plastic thingy - the camera just takes a wee bit of time to defog once you bring it in.

I would use a tripod. I don't have a remote, so I just used the self-timer - and 30 seconds exposure. My d80 had issues focusing if there was no moon - one thing I used to do was leave a light on in the cabin, walk far enough out onto the lake so that this light was at infinity focus, then use AEL. I've heard that removing your UV filters is a good thing to do for Northern Lights, but have no real opinion on this myself.

Thanks everyone for your responses! This is definitely helpful!
A few things:
- I did check with Nikon a while back that the 16GB SDHC card does work with the D80, although I can no longer find the page.
- Remote tested well today, I think I got it.
- The one thing I am feeling a bit bizarre about is when using Manual Focus and testing out shots inside the house, the photo comes out very dark even at f/2.8, of course with landscape I am just fine (that's the dummy in me). Any suggestions there?
- I am going to try to test out some shots of the skies here in California and see what I get...
I am definitely going to read more during the next week or two before I head over to Sweden. Will definitely share once I get back at the end of the month!

(sorry about the darkness issue, i just realized that I didn't set it at aperture priority... )

Good advice above, I wrote and article about cold weather shooting, (link). I side with Dan, condensation in this dry cold is not that much of a problem unless humidity inside is very high. I usually just leave my gear to warm up in the bag for a while when I come in (plenty of -40degree weather here in Fairbanks lately).
Just a gorillapod for support may not do you much good in the snow, I would bring a real tripod. Even a fairly lightweight one should do if you do not extend the center column. Of course it is possible to just brace the camera on something relatively stable as I did here yesterday morning, I just put it on top of my backpack but a tripod is much more comfortable to use and would have given better results: http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Oivind-Toien-2012-02-04-0538H-3398-lg_1328406219.jpg
In case the web page changes, here is the image directly linked (12mm, 15s exposure at f/4.5 and ISO 800):

When fumbling around in the dark a small headlamp is very useful when setting up equipment.
Infinity focus as mentioned above can be problematic to obtain in the dark with AF lenses. What you can do is to in full daylight use AF to try to learn where to manually set the lens on the scale to obtain infinity focus at a few focal length settings you will use for the aurora. I bet you will like the wide end of your 11-16mm.
Exposure may vary quite a bit depending on intensity of aurora and ambient light. You could even try aperture priority with for instance one stop underexposure.
Shoot raw. When processing try out a few alternative whitebalance settings. For the image above I used fluorescent WB. I know of photographers that are found of the incandescent WB for aurora, both gives bluer sky.
Batteries, you need batteries - these long exposures with following dark frames draw a lot of power. For a 4h session with my D200, http://otoien.zenfolio.com/p751735050 , I have managed to exhaust all my 4 batteries although it was not that cold (late September).