Rarer red auroras
Two nights ago, the Aurora Borealis was visible unusually south. We could see a subtle glow from the garden, so decided to travel out to a nearby airfield to maximise sky and minimise light pollution.
We were lucky in that the first marked activity spike of the evening happened soon after we arrived.
We stayed for about an hour, and when we were home, the northern lights were still putting on a good show.
I took some photos — both at the airfield and when we got back, and put them on Instagram.
I also posted a timelapse reel. This was too short to capture the pulsations / fluctuations / undulations of the aurora, but you can see passing planes, car headlights coming and going, and, I fancy, a satellite.
I was lucky enough to travel into the Arctic Circle a few years ago. Though we did see the lights, they were dimmer, and green only. (Apparently red is rarer.) But we didn’t have the cameras to capture them well.
This was a welcome reminder of how good iPhone cameras are. After banking a few safe pictures, I got experimental in the settings. But nothing I tried did a better job than what the camera could figure out for itself — with the 1x lens especially.
The old of our two iPhones is an 11 Pro (I think) and still took excellent photos. Interestingly, the greens skewed bluer on the older iPhone. More beautiful, to my eyes.
I sometimes toy with the idea of binning off iPhones and getting a dumb phone with a camera. But I think iPhones are my cameras now. That’s not unusual, I know. But as someone whose main creative hobby is photography, perhaps it is?
I can make do with old ones — my vibe’s pretty lofi. It’s just a case of battery and attention management. Plenty of guides out there on how to dumb-phone-ify an iPhone.
Apologies for linking to Instagram photos directly. Not a good web experience — and an impossible one without an Insta account. I’m open to better solutions, but life is short.