Yes, awesome advice, thanks for that detailed write-up. I took some shots of the aurora some years ago in Iceland with my shitty Nikon DSLR and they came out pretty bad, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I wish I had this post back then 
(It was all good, though, I ended up paying less attention to the camera and more to the aurora, which was totally amazing.)
Last night’s tests (featuring the Big Dipper). One taken with the phone, one with the 80D. Which do you like best? Don’t cheat by looking at the file info!
The first one has better resolution and color.
The first one is clearly better. I do note the presence of a cloud in the second one, or is that a contrail?
I also like the first one, but I suspect that the exposure will need to be longer (or ISO increased). When I was shooting the lights in Tromso, they were not as bright as I expected them to be. Fortunately, I had come up with some good preprogrammed brackets when testing. The lights move quickly enough that you don’t want too long of an exposure or they will look hazy/blurred. Aperture was not a problem, since I had a fast decent lens that was wide open, so I was having to balance the ISO and exposure. The mountains in the foreground actually look like it’s daylight.
Once I was satisfied, I just let my camera shoot continuously from the tripod.
In case you didn’t look, or guess:
I took lots of other shots with both cameras, but selected these two as the best comparison pair.
My fastest lens for the Canon is the 3.5 18-200mm used here, whereas the phone’s lens is 1.8, 2 stops faster. OTOH, the phone’s max ISO is 3200, where 80D goes beyond 12,800. The Canon obviously has much better resolution, but that’s hardly a major concern when shooting the aurora.
You know how they say that generals are always preparing to fight the last war? I think that’s what was responsible for my initial impulse not to take the DSLR on this trip. A year and a half ago I was planning a three-week trip through the Adriatic, and asked for advice about whether to take the DLSR.
The advice of many there confirmed my decision not to take it, and I think that was the right choice. We were walking around a lot, the weather was broiling hot for most of the time, and lugging the Canon would have been a major pain for a relatively small improvement in image quality. The phone was simple, easy, and good enough.
So I headed into this trip with a bias toward that decision. But even a few minutes’ testing with the Canon in the dark the other night highlighted some major operational advantages, entirely apart from image quality.
First, the 80D’s screen is flippable and rotatable, which means that when the camera is tilted up on the tripod, I can adjust the screen to look down at it. This is much more comfortable than having to crouch down to peer up at the phone’s screen when it’s tilted up.
Second, although the 80D has a touch-screen, you can also make all necessary adjustments using its wheel and buttons, whereas touching the screen is obviously the only option for adjustments on the phone. (Except for taking the shot: I have a Bluetooth remote for the phone. I also have a wired remote for the Canon.) In the cold of the Norwegian night, keeping gloves on will be a big advantage.
The Canon has far more flexibility in terms of settings than the Pro mode of the phone, and more importantly for these old eyes, the display for those settings is more readable than the tiny icons and text of the phone’s display.
Finally, WRT the lugging issue, on this trip, my main (perhaps only) use of the DLSR will be on the two bus excursions we’re taking to see the Northern Lights. We’ll do a little hiking to get to good viewing areas, but once we find a place, I expect we’ll be staying there. So it’s not like I’ll be walking for miles with the camera around my neck. For the rest of the time, I can use the phone, just as I did in Europe in 2023.
In short, I’m taking the DSLR.
So I have a few additional questions, especially for @ZonexandScout. The shots above are just the night sky above Swampscott, MA, as seen across Nahant Bay, i.e., light spill from a suburban town on a clear night. Are the aurora going to be dimmer than that? I assumed they would be brighter, and that a shorter exposure than these would do.
In light of that, how important do you think having a faster lens would be? Is the 3.5 really too slow? I’m not going to buy a $400-500 lens just for this trip (I’m not likely to have any desperate need for it in the future), but I can rent an ƒ/1.4 24mm Canon for about $180. It would obviously be better. But better enough?
I’m also considering a new carbon fiber tripod that would be better for the 80D than the cheapie I got from Amazon for my phone. That’s another $120, and I think it’s a priority over a faster lens. What do you think?
Thanks again to everyone for their advice, particularly @ZonexandScout.
The lights were dimmer than I expected. Of course, they are highly variable, but it was a new moon and we were away from the city (Tromso), so I expected them to appear a bit brighter.
I was using a Canon Rebel T3 (this was a few years ago) with an Android camera app on my tablet connected to the camera with a USB cable. This made it easy to change settings and shoot without touching the camera. Ambient temps were about 8 degrees F on both nights.
I found that I got the best results with exposures of about 3 to 5 seconds. Any longer and the lights looked a bit blurred. (They move quickly.) Unlike your photos, there were no artificial light sources in the scene. But the mountains had quite a bit of snow.
I was initially reluctant to push the ISO and exposure too hard, but the pics ended up looking best when I could see a lot of details in the mountains. Unlike many photos I’ve seen that sort of have a black horizon, I’ve got mountains with great contrast in the pics.
Again, I used a tablet and, once I felt that I had bracketed my settings OK, I just set the camera to shoot about every 15 seconds. There was no way I could react quickly enough to the variations to catch a particularly nice “sequence.”
BTW, we were actually in Finland when our group stopped for the session.
Good luck!
Speaking for my linked photo from a lousy camera, that aurora was so dim that it was invisible to the naked eye. The sky looked blank (except for stars) and only showed up on the photo. But your viewing conditions should be better than those in South Carolina.
The Aurora in the far north can be pretty bright. Bright enough to read by,
The brightness is highly variable. We went to Norway specifically to see them, and we chose several days around the new moon. Of the three tours/guides we booked on successive nights, one was too cloudy (snow) to see anything, one was basically unsuccessful, and the last disappointed us with the lack of color/brightness. And that was it. Time to go home.
We have two excursions booked specifically to see them, one of which will go for up to 9 hours, and like yours, promises to take us to Finland, if necessary.
Also, the cruise ship has a system to notify passengers if the lights become visible while at sea, and they use only red lights on the top deck to keep your eyes dark adapted.
This guy, who is right now on the same cruise we’ll be taking in two weeks, got some pretty impressive shots from the ship with, I presume, his phone.
First night on the ship. A major depression is heading toward the Norwegian coast, so instead of Alta, where we had aurora excursions booked, we’re heading to the safer waters of Trondheim, with the rest of the itinerary TBD.
That unfortunate news was lightened (literally) by the view tonight from the ship.
Taken with my Galaxy S21 phone, f 1.8, 1/2 sec, 4000 ISO. I used structures on the ship to brace the phone. (Very few other people were.) Hence the nice, sharp stars. The upper deck was very crowded with people, so using my 80D and tripod, if I had even thought about it, would have been impractical. At f3.5, the exposure would have been 2 secs, plus.
If we can go on an excursion with a smaller group, I’ll try the 80D. If we can’t, I saw the aurora and got a few decent pictures.
More pictures when we get to Trondheim and have better connectivity.
I had some good luck with the aurora on a couple of nights on my trip to Alaska:
Excellent! That’s really a terrific picture! What are the technical details? Camera? Settings?
And thanks for reminding me to post a few more of my less spectacular shots.
(click to see the whole vertical image)
These were all taken the first night with my phone. The aurora appeared the next night, but were not as good, and although I tried using the DSLR, the results were vastly inferior. The ship was moving more, and because the lens was slower than the phone’s the exposures were longer, so there was more blurring, and much more noise.
Unfortunately, our ship never made it to any of our scheduled ports in the north of Norway, so we couldn’t go on any of our land-based aurora hunting expeditions. So I never got the chance to try any of @ZonexandScout’s excellent tips.
Lesson learned: Don’t rely on a cruise ship to get you to places in the Arctic Circle in the winter time. Take a plane.
Canon R5, 15mm, 2.0 seconds, f2.8, ISO 6400
Very nice!