So I went far from the city to see the aurora borealis. With the Sun near solar maximum and a powerful geomagnetic storm incoming, I had high hopes for the night.
Sadly, the lights were just barely visible. You technically could see them, and a decent camera would capture the lights, but the lights were very faint to the naked eye. In fact, I had reduce the image compression in this post because otherwise the faint colours would be lost.
Not to mention, I was dumb and brought a camera lens that zoomed in way too much, so I could capture much of the sky at once. Oh well.
Here’s the best shots I had, with and without edits. If you were to have seen the lights, they would look closer to my unedited images. But since those look rather boring, I added in a few pictures my friend took and edited, because he is a better photographer than me (and the images look cooler).
Not sure if I should say this trip was a disappointment. I did see the lights, but they were very faint. You could easily mistake them for a fast moving cloud. At least I can claim I saw the lights, and have an idea of what they might look like when conditions are ideal. The mini roadtrip itself was fun too.
It was also a little disheartening to see how easy phone cameras made capturing the lights. I used a bulky DSLR with > 10s exposure time with high ISO and prayed that no car headlights would blind the view, but someone with a budget modern phone could just lean the phone against a rock and use an exposure time of maybe 3 seconds, but the image quality looked better. It’s a mix of technological progress and software, which makes it impressive and defeating at the same time.