Earlier this week, the Sun let loose a wicked CME, unleashing a high-powered geomagnetic storm. The disturbance was so great that last night the Aurora Borealis, a.k.a. The Northern Lights, could be seen well into the southern states! We trekked up to our friends’ home on the far north side of our town for a chance to finally see the light show.
There wasn’t time to assemble all the good photo gear, so our we ran out with nothing more than our cell-phones. I do wish I’d known enough in advance to have been able to make sure at least one battery for the “real” camera was charged. That being said, I’m pretty impressed with the results from the usually disappointing iPhone 13 Mini’s camera. Here are a handful of shots from nearly the middle-of-nowhere Carroll County.
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All images are straight from the iPhone — absolutely no post processing. Exposure times were either 3-seconds or 10-seconds, with the phone hand-held, in “night mode”. There’s a little bit of blur in some of them due to camera shake, but by and large, the image stabilization did a really good job.
Seeing the Northern Lights without the aid of the camera can be tricky, although last night’s show was spectacular enough that the reds were generally visible so I knew where to point the camera. Looking on the phone, even before the taking the picture, gave a much better indication of what I could expect to get.
For the best view — and pictures — it’s best to be as far away from sources of “light pollution” as possible, though it’s sometimes possible to get a shot even when shooting through the lights of a town or city. This shot was made after we got home. I could just barely see a tinge of red in the sky to the north (we live on the south side of town, and the light show was happening to the north).

This is a 10-second exposure, with the phone propped on the roof of the truck, looking northward across our lawn and across town towards where we had gone to see the lights. You can see the magenta streaks even through all the light.
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