Photographing the northern lights

Why the camera sees more than your eyes

At night, the eye relies on rod cells. They detect very faint light but only in shades of grey. A weak aurora can therefore look like a pale, whitish veil, easy to mistake for a thin cloud. A camera sensor has no such limit, and with a long exposure and a high ISO it collects light for many seconds and shows the same aurora as a clear green band. On a strong night you see colour and movement with your own eyes; on a weak night the screen shows far more than the sky.

This matters for your expectations and for tour rules that depend on what the camera “captures”. Photos of a weak night are not fake; they simply show what the eye cannot.

With a smartphone

• Use night mode, or the manual or pro mode with a long exposure. Recent iPhones and Android phones can take surprisingly good aurora photos this way.
• Keep the phone still. Lean it on something solid or use a small tripod; every movement during the exposure blurs the picture.
• Turn off the flash and do not zoom.
• Batteries drain much faster in the cold. Keep the phone in an inside pocket between shots and close other apps.

With a camera

• Tripod. Exposures of several seconds are impossible to hold by hand.
• Starting values. Visit Norway suggests aperture f/2.8, ISO 1600 and a 15-second exposure as a starting point, with ISO between 800 and 3200 depending on other light sources such as the moon. Use the widest aperture your lens allows.
• Focus manually on a bright star until it is as small as possible on the screen; autofocus struggles in the dark.
• Shorter exposures for a fast aurora. When the lights move quickly, a shorter exposure keeps their shape; a long one turns them into a soft glow.
• Spare batteries, kept warm in an inside pocket.

Let the guide help

Many guides help with camera and phone settings, and on most minibus chases a professional photo of your group is part of the tour. Read the photo line in the table: some tours deliver photos the next day, and The Green Adventure watermarks its files. One reviewer of Amazing Arctic Tours writes that the photos took a week to arrive.

Light and location

Streetlights, headlights and billboards brighten the sky and wash out a faint aurora. Chase tours drive to dark spots for this reason, though not every stop is perfect: one reviewer describes a roadside car park next to a bright billboard. A bright moon lights the landscape nicely for photos, but also makes a weak aurora harder to see.

Sources: Space.com (why eyes see grey auroras and cameras see colour), Visit Norway (how to photograph the northern lights); checked October 2026.