Last August, over a calm Michigan lake, Karl Duesterhaus, 34, of Chicago, encountered an unusual phenomenon: the northern lights, appearing as blurry colors in a brighter-than-usual night sky. It was a cool experience, he said, but he was surprised when he looked at cellphone photos taken the night before.
“The colors were much more defined,” he said.
Mr. Duesterhaus is not alone in being struck by the difference between the subtle colors captured by the naked eye and the vivid hues that appear in digital photographs. Many travelers, some of whom were lured by these stunning images on social media, are also noticing the difference.
As the solar activity that causes the northern lights is expected to reach the peak of its 11-year cycle next year, opportunities to see it are flourishing through cruises, train excursions and tours. According to market research firm Grand View Research, Northern Lights tourism generated $843 million in 2023 and is projected to grow nearly 10 percent annually through 2030.
Berkeley, Calif.-based Wilderness Travel said bookings for its winter trip to Iceland — largely driven by northern lights seekers — have grown 130 percent annually on average since 2021. demand for winter flights to Finland, a prime location for Aurora viewing is up more than 70 percent this winter compared to last.
Winter hotel stays in coastal Tromsø in northern Norway, a popular aurora destination, rose 7% from 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 chaser,” astronomer Tom Kers, to be on its increasingly popular winter sailings along the Norwegian coast.
Nature-focused travel, a growing interest in astrotourism, and a greater understanding of how and when auroras appear have contributed to the popularity of aurora tourism. But that too, some aurora experts say, has cell phone cameras, creating many of the colorful images that have appeared on social media, especially in the past year. So much so that at Borealis Basecamp in Fairbanks, Alaska, a 40-cabin resort dedicated to aurora viewing, management informs guests before they arrive of the gap they might witness between the real-life spectacle and some images. (The resort is sold out for the current fall through spring season.)
“We’re getting two responses,” said Adriel Butler, founder and CEO of Borealis Basecamp. One is frustration. the other more nuanced. “They’ll say, ‘All the photos are doctored and edited with larger-than-life images, but what I’m going to see is actually real.’
To understand what creates the northern lights and how we and the cameras see them differently, we turned to the experts.
What causes the northern lights?
Scott Engle, assistant professor of astrophysics and planetary science at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., described the aurora borealis as the optical effect of particles emitted from the sun encountering the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The sun is always losing tiny bits of its mass, which is what we call the solar wind,” he said. “They hit whatever gas is in the Earth’s atmosphere and transfer their energy to it and make it glow.”
The sun undergoes an activity cycle of 11 years. In the previous year, activity was high, which represents more views.
“When the sun’s activity is at or near maximum, the density level of these particles in the solar wind increases,” said Mr. Engle.
The lights appear inside what’s known as the aurora oval, a zone that roughly rings the Earth’s geomagnetic poles, said Shannon Schmoll, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich. To the north, the oval sits above popular Northern Lights destinations such as Canada, Alaska and Iceland.
“With a stronger storm, that oval where we see the aurora gets pushed further south,” Ms. Schmoll.
What role did digital photography play in aurora mania?
Before the arrival of digital photography, capturing live shots of the northern lights required an intimate knowledge of camera exposure and film speed, good timing, and a bit of luck.
That changed around 2008 with the introduction of digital cameras that were more sensitive to low light, said Lance Keimig, a Vermont photographer and fellow at National Parks at Night, an organization that teaches night photography around the world.
Early light-sensitive cameras “enabled people who were already taking night photography to take it to the next level,” said Mr. Keimig, adding that the technology took off among more casual photographers with the next generation of cameras around 2012.
The advent of light-sensitive cell phone cameras before the peak of the current 11-year solar cycle, when sightings occurred as far south as Florida, made similar technology available to more aurora watchers. In 2018, Google’s Pixel camera introduced “night vision,” which allowed for sharper images in low-light situations. The iPhone’s “night mode” arrived the following year. The evolution of photo editing applications and lightweight equipment have added to the brilliance of night photos.
Sean J. Bentley, associate professor of physics at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, reported advances in camera technology for better images of the last solar cycle, which lasted from 2008 to 2019.
“Even as recently as the last peak in early 2014, most digital cameras, including basically all those on phones, were unable to get good-night images of even bright, stationary objects like the moon and worse, auroras.” Mr. Bentley wrote in an email.
Gondwana Ecotours, which has been offering saddle itineraries in Fairbanks, Alaska since 2013, has seen a 20 percent increase in bookings on its trips over the past two seasons.
“When we first started these tours, capturing the aurora with a cell phone was impossible,” said Jared Sternberg, president. “Now, iPhones and other smartphones can take more than decent pictures of the aurora.”
Why does my camera see more than my eyes?
The technology lens is better than human when it comes to night vision. Basically, the photoreceptors in the eye take two main forms, rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive to light but cannot detect colors. With enough light, the cones step in to determine the colors.
“As you experience every time you get up during the night, we don’t differentiate colors well when we’re in a dark environment,” wrote Mr. Bentley.
Cameras are more efficient at detecting color because they can handle more exposure than your eye, according to Mr. Engle, of Villanova University.
“The digital detector that your camera has is probably much more sensitive to red wavelengths of light than your eye and will pick up those longer, redder wavelengths much better,” said Mr. Engle.
And there are many other AI-based improvements to cellphone cameras that can produce shots that once only high-end cameras could, including taking multiple photos in quick succession and using technology to stitch them together for a sharper, more colorful and clear image.
So, are these aurora photos real?
Douglas Goodwin, the Fletcher Jones Scholar in Computation and visiting assistant professor of media studies at Scripps College in Claremont, California, published an article on this topic in May on The Conversation, a nonprofit news site. In his article, Mr. Goodwin stripped away the enhancements typically made by smartphone cameras to produce two images of the aurora—one that approximated the naked eye and another taken with a phone camera.
“Phones exaggerate it a bit, but they don’t completely mess it up,” said Mr. Goodwin in an interview. “They see it better than we do.”
Nori Jemil, London-based photographer and author of The Travel Photographer’s Way, has taught photography courses in Iceland and Patagonia. Cell phone cameras, he said, automatically do the normal post-production work “like photoshopping, image stacking, color enhancement and picking out things the eye can’t see. It’s not fake, but it uses computer algorithms to put it all 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.
On her photography expeditions, Stephanie Vermillion, a Cleveland-based writer and astrotourism photographer and author of “100 Nights of a Lifetime: The World’s Ultimate Adventures After Dark,” said she’ll scan the horizon with her cell phone camera if she can’t . see any activity, “because he sees them better than me.”
She sets the camera to shoot in time lapse mode (for iPhone users she suggests the NightCap app) and then watches the screen with her eyes.
“If I’m constantly fiddling with my camera, I’m going to ruin the moment,” said Ms. Vermillion.
Joe Buffalo Child, who offers guided aurora viewing 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 an enhanced aurora with built-in AI capabilities,” he said. “However, as we always say on our tours, be sure to enjoy the aurora with your eyes and heart.”
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