Doesn’t look like that in reality. If I take a photo on my phone here in the UK midlands I get pink and green in all directions with a 3 second exposure.
However with just the naked eye it’s like super high level clouds
Ok why is it that some people say northern lights look EXACTLY like these spectacular photos, and others say in real life they are actually barely visible and you need a camera and very dark skies?
Is there some kind of running joke I’m missing? I saw some northern lights in Iceland but they were very dim and underwhelming, I didn’t even know what I was looking at until I photographed them and saw the vivid green streaks in the photo, which definitely weren’t super visible in real life. The tour guide even said they aren’t actually like the photos at all!
Are northern lights bullshit or what? What is possible to see with just a bare naked eye?
They'll never look exactly like the long exposure, ultra vibrant photos. However, when they are really strong you can see both greens and purples very distinctly with the naked eye.
One experience you can get in person when they're really strong is how fast they can dance around above you as well. I've found the dancing lights to the naked eye are much more astounding than in timelapses or videos, 1) because that's when they're most vibrant in person, and 2) because you can see just how fast and jittery and energetic they are, unlike in a video which is usually captured at much less than 30fps for low light and denoised and frames mashed together to create those soupy smooth videos and timelapses. Nice in their own way, but nowhere near the same experience.
And when they're very low energy they will just look like green grey clouds to the naked eye.
I've seen both impressive (colorful, bright, straight overhead and fast movement) as well as barely noticeable (colorless bands/sheets that "look like faint clouds but somehow odd". With the "odd" mostly meaning that they move different from clouds; not preferentially in wind (or any) direction, and often just around our eye's threshold. It also, sometimes, looks like a band of light pollution low along the northern horizon, when the green main aurora oval is "just" visible.
Few-seconds exposures on a digital camera bring the colors out that you may or may not see by eye if the aurora is weak.
Also, especially mid-latitudes, sometimes an Aurora display has moments of higher brightness with color, and then again "grey curtains".
The most impressive thing about stronger Aurora, to me, is the "fine structure", the fact you may have it well overhead (not just on the northern horizon) and the fast movements. It can look like "beads" running up and down the curtains, or "lances" being thrown from the sky, and line/streak structures are very sharply outlined, not like the soft blur in multi-second pictures. And the curtains can "wave" across the entire sky in a second then.
But I haven't seen enough Aurora to dare predict anything ... I cross my fingers.
Imo if the northern lights are strong, the live experience is superior to photos because of how they move, while photos are still images. But many times they are not as strong and they do not look like much with naked eye, while long exposure will catch more of it.
One thing to consider is that when you run outside because you get a tip about northern lights, your eyes need about 20-30 minutes to fully adjust to darkness. If you do things like look at a phone display or camera display while waiting, that "timer" gets reset.
In my experience when the lights are strong (and your eyes have adjusted), they look a lot like the photos - not as saturated color-wise, but very bright.
I wonder the same. My wife and I drove out to a park east of Seattle late last night to spend a couple hours watching the aurora, and it was... okay. I saw some faint grey wisps, like high-altitude clouds, which occasionally faded away and reappeared elsewhere. A mild novelty, but nothing I would bother to seek out again; I assumed we were too far south, or out of the path, and hadn't gotten to see it properly.
This morning, though, my feeds are chock-a-block with dramatic, colorful, detailed photos, complete with rapturous commentary about the drama of the spectacle, posted by people in the same area who were apparently watching the same sky! Well... that's a different experience than I had. I'd been told that the colors showed up more clearly through a camera, but I hadn't realized there would be little to see without one.
There are many variables. Visual acuity, how well your eyes can adapt to low light, colour sensitivity, light pollution and cloud cover are just a few. Even standing next to each other two people can have different experiences thanks to those variables.
I am very fortunate to have excellent visual acuity, low light sensitivity and am extremely sensitive to colour/different shades or tones. There are test you can do online for this if you have a well calibrated screen. I also used to be a photographer and worked for years in low light settings documenting events. So I have put that good fortune in the genetic lottery to good use!
So for me, I absolutely saw the full colour display very strongly. I could see variations in colour throughout the height of the column and i could easily make out the striations between the different filaments. I could also easily see the curve of the bands across the northern sky. The colours to me were as obvious as the orange of light pollution you might see from a nearby town. I could see the low level patches of cloud silhouetted against the green and the huge bands of red/pinky red towering up into space.
What I will say though is that even looking at my phone was enough to dull the experience. And minimally strong light in the eye instantly desaturated the colours of the aurora and took a minute or two to recover. So you really do need dark places, dark skies and to really let your eyes full adjust to their maximum possible sensitivity.
So at 9:55PM in central Kansas, you could see definite pink/red in the north (vertical strips, reminiscent of sunset/sunrise through clouds) and a bright colorless/maybe greenish patch straight up. Also some faint pink to the west. The color was unmistakable in the north though and only required a minute or so of dark adaptation after coming out of the house. It's dark skies here but not extremely dark. Funny thing is the aurora itself made the sky very not-dark.
That's a little like asking people to report how wet they got when it was raining, and not controlling for if they have an umbrella or were out after the storm passed.
> Ok why is it that some people say northern lights look EXACTLY like these spectacular photos, and others say in real life they are actually barely visible and you need a camera and very dark skies?
There is a lot of variability in people’s night vision. I viewed this past aurora with a friend, we went to a relatively dark sky location and let our eyes adjust for 30 minutes. In that setting, I could make out the green and red coloration while she mostly saw it as a while glow.
I saw them yesterday mostly as light grey clouds. But at one moment, those clouds turned slightly red to me. I am at a very bright location and quite far to the south. So I only can assume, that their brightness was at the brink of color vision and that my eye wasn't perfectly adapted to the dark. In better circumstances and perhaps with a tiny bit more "signal", they should appear in colors.
Not bullshit. When you see a strong one, it looks like all the amazing photos, and better because it’s moving and spanning the sky. Photos never capture the scale.
I had a similar thought about the sun’s corona during a solar eclipse, for some reason I thought people were using special photo processes to extract something that was hard to see without equipment. Then caught an eclipse and the corona blooms like a huge flower in the sky and it’s better than almost all the photos. I’m guessing the dynamic range of the corona makes it very hard to photograph anywhere near as good as what it looks like when you’re there.
Last night from London the most I could see with my naked eye was diffuse patches of faint pink and green - sometimes highlighted by marginally brighter white-pink streaks that cut across the patches. The camera however picked them up as dramatic bright pink/green columns of light with rarely any trace of the blackness of the sky.
When I was in Iceland a few years ago though - I distinctly remember being easily able to make out super bright and well define dancing wavy bands of bright green, pink, purple and orange (with high contrast compared to the surrounding dark sky) with my naked eye. The camera again picked up the same thing but with the blackness of the sky covered by a green /pink coloured background - something definitely brighter but less well defined that what I could see with my naked eye (and the camera images were not necessarily superior than what I could see in this case).
TL:DR; I’ve seen both versions of what you describe with my naked eye and it’s definitely not bullshit! When people say they can’t see anything like the pictures - I would have to guess that they either have never been in an area with significant activity or maybe didn’t have dark enough skies without light pollution.
In my back garden in london initially it felt like maybe I was just seeing remnants of having looked at a lightbulb and then looking at the sky. After a bit of eyes adjusting the pinks were very clear and the white streaks like rays of light you see in those kind of beams from heaven type pictures. The green was more on the horizon and initially needed the camera to show it at all, and then again after a while I could see feint green with the naked eye. Yes the camera showed it more, but the naked eye experience was also magical and I feel very lucky to have seen it on bbc news website by chance before going to bed. I watched it from 11:15pm to midnight when it seemed to vanish as if it was never there in the first place. I feel like I caught the ISS in a photo too but I can’t find definitive information it was overhead at 11:51pm uk time, so it probably wasn’t.
Yeah, typically northern lights look like faint white clouds with a little bit of green tint to naked eye. The photos are like those time-exposure photos of the milky way, which is not what the eye sees.
If you ever have the chance to see the Milky way from Namibia, the Andes, the Western Australian desert, you may revise your view there. The dust clouds and star streams extend far out and make it appear like "standing on the bridge of as starship". It looks very 3D. Still not colorful, but immersive and so much detail.
Alas, in the northern hemisphere, we've been pretty good eradicating nighttime darkness (and a lot else besides ...).
In the northern hemisphere, you can enjoy that view - spectacularly - from Mauna Kea. I had never before realized that you could perceive depth in the sky.
You should try seeing the milky way from the middle of an ocean sometime - most folks have never been far enough from light pollution to really see it as it used to be.
It really does look like a river of starlight across the sky, once you are a few hundred miles away from shore.
In addition to the intensity of the Solar activity, location matters, especially nowadays.
The auroras won't be super vivid near larger cities in Central Europe, with a lot of light around you. It's just not north enough and not dark enough. Up north, rural Lapland or so, it can get very vivid during a winter.
Cameras tend to add their extra though.
A surprising thing to me was how the aurora can sometimes be still and sometimes move so fast. It is a strange experience. One would expect something that covers such a large part of the visible sky-dome to move slowly, but instead it can swipe around quite quickly ("like a fox's tail").
While they "typically" look like that, because most often they're quite weak, I wouldn't compare it to milky way photos. If it's strong, especially if you're up north and somewhere with little light pollution, what you see is comparable to lots of pictures.
Yeah, camera sensors (depending on filtering) are far more sensitive to the dim light of the aurora than our eyes. Still means you can get utterly amazing photography there already! :)
What the camera caught was really impressive! Even with just a couple seconds exposure on a phone. But what the human eye saw was.... effectively a portion of the sky that was unusually bright and seemed to have some sort of movement. Like you stared at it and knew something was amiss, but nothing "impressive" to look at.
A couple of years ago in the middle of Norway (not south, not north, in-between) me and a friend saw in the news that there would be aurora borealis, which is not common in that part of Norway.
We were outside at like 2AM in the night that day trying to spot it but could see any hint of it for the life of us.
Finally we used his phone and long exposure to see what it would pick up and on the captured photo we saw shades of green like aurora borealis.
For sure. As mentioned though we were in the middle of Norway, not north.
Well, actually the proper term for where we were at is East Norway. And I guess by official standards the middle of Norway is further north than where I consider the middle of Norway to be.
I was lucky enough to be in Tromsø in February 2013 during the last solar cycle maximum. It was absolutely amazing, even a local who we happened upon near one of the fjords while he was cross country skiing - in the middle of the night - said that he had never seen such aurora. They were gold and purple along with the more common greens and reds that we had seen all week.
