# Photographers: Tips on shooting the Northern Lights?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/photographers-tips-on-shooting-the-northern-lights/1013383>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 25, 2025, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/photographers-tips-on-shooting-the-northern-lights/1013383 "2025-01-25T16:00:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

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**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\
**Post date:** [January 26, 2025, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/photographers-tips-on-shooting-the-northern-lights/1013383/8 "2025-01-26T02:01:52Z")

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> [@Reply](#):
>
> With a phone’s tiny lens, can you even let in enough light in a “short-enough” long exposure to show the aurora, but without risking star trails?

Look at this photo. It is a pretty lousy photo, but it was made with a pretty lousy camera for low light conditions. But it still captured a _very_ faint aurora (in South Carolina) in a 1/6th second exposure. With a better camera (like your Galaxy has) and brighter aurora (which your location should have) I’m guessing that you wouldn’t need to crack 1 second for the exposure.

> [@Auroras deep south again (October 10th 2024)](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/auroras-deep-south-again-october-10th-2024/1008651/17):
>
> That’s weird, that’s the second time lately that hosting site has randomly deleted a set of my images (never mind that Discourse is random whether it embeds them or not). I won’t try reupping them all to Imgur (which is flakey for me) but here’s the best of the group, which shows both red and green patches. [[image] ](https://i.imgur.com/1IlrC2o.jpeg) (That is from my phone’s “night mode”, which a check of the EXIF shows to be ISO-16896, 1/6s.)

What I kick myself for is not taking a large number of the shots a second or so apart to make a time-lapse video of the aurora as it shifts (as low quality as that would be). If I were you having the chance to do it again I’d try a few shots to see what a good shutter time is, then leave the camera be to do a long timelapse video.

(ETA, I should be aiming that comment at commasense.)

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