Last August, above a calm lake in Michigan, Karl Duesterhaus, 34, of Chicago, was treated to an unusual phenomenon: the Northern Lights, which appeared as faint colors in a brighter-than-usual night sky. It was a fun experience, he said, but he was surprised when he looked at his cell phone photos taken the night before.
“The colors were much clearer,” he said.
Mr. Duesterhaus is not the only one struck by the difference between the subtle colors registered by the naked eye and the vibrant hues that appear in digital photographs. Many travelers, some lured by the stunning images on social media, are also noticing the difference.
With the solar activity that produces the Northern Lights expected to reach the peak of its eleven-year cycle next year, opportunities to see them are exploding through cruises, train journeys and tours. According to market research firm Grand View Research, Northern Lights tourism generated $843 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at almost 10 percent annually until 2030.
Berkeley, California-based travel agency Wilderness Travel said bookings for its winter trip to Iceland — largely driven by Northern Lights seekers — have increased an average of 130 percent annually since 2021. Demand for winter flights to Finland, a top location for aurora viewing, has increased more than 70 percent this winter compared to last winter.
The number of winter hotel stays on the coast of Tromsø in Northern Norway, a popular destination for the Northern Lights, has grown by 7 percent since 2019 to more than 202,000 between January and April 2024, according to Visit Norway. Last spring, Norway-based cruise line Hurtigruten appointed its first 'chief aurora hunter', astronomer Tom Kerss, who will be on board the increasingly popular winter sailings along the Norwegian coast.
Nature-focused travel, a growing interest in astrotourism and a better understanding of how and when aurora are formed have helped increase the popularity of Northern Lights tourism. But according to some aurora experts, cell phone cameras have also created many of the colorful images that have appeared on social media especially in the past year. So much so that management at the Borealis Basecamp in Fairbanks, Alaska, a 40-cabin resort dedicated to aurora viewing, informs guests before arrival about the gap they might witness between the real spectacle and some statues. (The resort is sold out for the current fall to spring season.)
“We get two reactions,” says Adriel Butler, the founder and CEO of Borealis Basecamp. One of them is disappointment; the other more nuanced. “They'll say, 'All the photos have been retouched and edited with life-size images, but what I'm about to see is real.'”
To understand what causes the Northern Lights and how we and cameras see them differently, we turned to the experts.
What causes the Northern Lights?
Scott Engle, assistant professor of astrophysics and planetary sciences at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania, described the northern lights phenomenon as the visual result of particles ejected from the sun and entering the Earth's atmosphere.
“The sun is always losing little bits of its own mass, what we call the solar wind,” he said. “They hit any gas in the Earth's atmosphere, imparting their energy to it and causing it to glow.”
The sun undergoes an eleven-year activity cycle. Activity was high last year, which resulted in more sightings.
“When the Sun's activity is at or near maximum, the density level of these particles in the solar wind increases,” Mr Engle said.
The lights appear within what is known as an aurora oval, a belt that roughly surrounds Earth's geomagnetic poles, said Shannon Schmoll, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Michigan. The oval is in the north. over popular Northern Lights destinations including Canada, Alaska and Iceland.
“With a stronger storm, the oval where we see the aurora will be pushed further south,” Ms Schmoll said.
What role has digital photography played in aurora mania?
Before the advent of digital photography, getting vivid shots of the Northern Lights required a thorough knowledge of camera lighting and film speed, good timing and some luck.
That changed around 2008 with the introduction of digital cameras that were more sensitive to low light, says Lance Keimig, a Vermont photographer and partner at National Parks at Night, an organization that teaches night photography around the world.
The early light-sensitive cameras “made it possible for people who were already doing night photography to take it to the next level,” Mr. Keimig said, adding that the technology took off among more mainstream photographers around 2012 with the next generation of cameras.
The advent of light-sensitive cell phone cameras before the peak of the current eleven-year solar cycle, when observations occurred as far south as Florida, made similar technology available to more aurora watchers. In 2018, Google's Pixel Camera introduced 'night vision', allowing for sharper images in low light. The following year, the iPhone's 'night mode' arrived. The evolution of photo editing apps and lightweight equipment have contributed to the brilliance of night photos.
Sean J. Bentley, associate professor of physics at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY, cited advances in camera technology for better images since the last solar cycle, which lasted from 2008 to 2019.
“Even during the last peak in early 2014, most digital cameras, including virtually all phone cameras, were unable to capture good night images of even bright, stable objects like the moon, and worse, auroras,” Mr. Bentley wrote in an email.
Gondwana Ecotours, which has been offering aurora itineraries in Fairbanks, Alaska, since 2013, has seen a 20 percent increase in bookings for its trips over the past two seasons.
“When we first started doing these tours, capturing the aurora with a cell phone was impossible,” says Jared Sternberg, the president. “Now iPhones and other smartphones can take more than decent images of the aurora.”
Why does my camera see more than my eye?
The lens of technology is better than the human lens when it comes to night vision. Basically, photoreceptors in the eye take two main forms: rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive to light, but cannot detect colors. With sufficient light, cones appear to determine the colors.
“As you notice when you get up at night, we cannot distinguish colors well when we are in a dark environment,” Mr. Bentley wrote.
According to Mr. Engle of Villanova University, cameras are more effective at seeing colors because they can handle longer exposures than your eye.
“Your camera's digital detector is most likely much more sensitive to red wavelengths of light than your eye and will bring out those longer, redder wavelengths much better,” Mr Engle said.
And there are plenty of other AI-based advancements in cell phone cameras that can produce shots once only possible with high-end cameras, including taking many photos in quick succession and using technology to combine them for a sharper, more colorful, and clearer image.
Are those photos of the aurora real?
Douglas Goodwin, the Fletcher Jones Scholar in Computation and visiting professor of media studies at Scripps College in Claremont, California, published an article on the topic in May on the Conversation, a nonprofit news site. In his article, Mr Goodwin removed the enhancements commonly made by smartphone cameras to produce two images of the aurora: one that approximates the naked eye and another taken with a phone camera.
“Phones are exaggerating it a little bit, but not completely making it up,” Mr. Goodwin said in an interview. “They see it better than we do.”
Nori Jemil, a London-based photographer and author of “The Travel Photographer's Way,” has taught photography classes in Iceland and Patagonia. Cell phone cameras, she said, automatically do the normal post-production work, “like photoshopping, stacking images, enhancing colors and picking out things the eye can't see.” It's not fake, but it uses computer algorithms to bring everything together for a wow effect.”
How can I photograph the aurora?
Stay up late. According to NOAA, the lights are most active within an hour or two after midnight.
During her photo expeditions, Stephanie Vermillion, a Cleveland astrotourism writer and photographer and author of “100 Nights of a Lifetime: The World's Ultimate Adventures After Dark,” said she will scan the horizon with her cell phone camera when she can't . seeing every activity, “because it sees them better than me.”
She sets the camera to record in time-lapse mode (for iPhone users, she recommends the NightCap app) and then looks at the screen with her own eyes.
“If I'm constantly fiddling with my camera, I ruin the moment,” Ms. Vermillion said.
Joe Buffalo Child, who offers guided aurora observations through his company, North Star Adventures, in Yellowknife, Canada's Northwest Territories, advises viewers to try to capture more than just a photo. “Mobile phones can capture enhanced aurora with built-in AI capabilities,” he said. “But as we always say on our trips, make sure you enjoy the auroras with your eyes and your heart.”
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