Is the aurora borealis really that mind-blowing? Or is it just your cellphone photos?

In August, over a calm Michigan lake, Mr Karl Duesterhaus, 34, of Chicago, was treated to an unusual phenomenon: the northern lights, which appeared as hazy colours in a brighter-than-usual night sky. It was a cool experience, he said, but he was surprised when he looked at cellphone photos taken the night before.

“The colours were much more defined,” he said.

Mr Duesterhaus is not the only one struck by the difference between the subtle colours that the naked eye registers and the vivid hues that appear in digital photos. Many travellers, some of them lured by those stunning images on social media, are also noticing the difference.

As the solar activity that causes the aurora borealis is expected to reach the peak of its 11-year cycle in the next year, opportunities to see it are booming via cruises, train trips and tours. According to the market research company Grand View Research, northern lights tourism generated US$843 million (S$1 billion) in 2023 and is projected to grow at nearly 10 per cent a year to 2030.

Nature-centric travel, growing interest in astro tourism, and a greater understanding of how and when auroras occur has helped fuel the popularity of northern lights tourism. But so, too, say some aurora experts, have cellphone cameras, creating many of the colourful images appearing on social media, especially in the past year. So much so that at the Borealis Basecamp in Fairbanks, Alaska, a 40-cabin resort devoted to aurora viewing, management informs guests before they arrive of the gulf they may witness between the real life spectacle and some images.

“We get two responses,” said Mr Adriel Butler, the founder and CEO of Borealis Basecamp. One is disappointment; the other more nuanced. “They’ll say, ‘All the photos are touched up and edited with bigger-than-life imagery, but what I’m going to see is actually real.’”

To understand what creates the northern lights, and how we and cameras see them differently, we turned to the experts.

What causes the northern lights?

Dr Scott Engle, an assistant professor of astrophysics and planetary science at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania, described the northern lights phenomenon as the visual result of particles issued by the sun encountering the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The sun is always losing tiny bits of its own mass, which is what we call the solar wind,” he said. “They hit whatever gas is in the Earth’s atmosphere and impart their energy to it and cause it to glow.”

The sun undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. In the past year, activity has been high, accounting for more sightings.

“When the sun’s activity is at or near maximum, the density level of these particles in the solar wind increases,” Dr Engle said.

What role has digital photography played in aurora mania?

Before the arrival of digital photography, getting vivid shots of the northern lights required a deep knowledge of camera exposures and film speed, good timing and some luck.

That changed around 2008 with the introduction of digital cameras that were more sensitive to low light, said Mr Lance Keimig, a Vermont-based photographer and a partner at National Parks at Night, an organisation that teaches night photography around the world.

The early light-sensitive cameras “made it possible for people already doing night photography to take it to the next level”, Mr Keimig said, adding that the technology took off among more casual photographers with the next generation of cameras around 2012.

The advent of light-sensitive cellphone cameras before the peak of the current 11-year solar cycle, when sightings occurred as far south as Florida, made similar technology available to more aurora viewers. In 2018, Google’s Pixel Camera introduced “night sight”, which allowed sharper images in low lighting situations. The iPhone’s “night mode” arrived the following year. The evolution of photo-editing apps and lightweight gear have added to the brilliance of night photos.

Dr Sean J. Bentley, an associate professor of physics at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, cited advancements in camera technology for better imagery since the last solar cycle, which lasted from 2008 to 2019.

“Even as recently as the last peak in early 2014, most digital cameras, including basically all of those on phones, were not capable of getting good night images of even bright, stable objects such as the moon, and worse so of auroras,” Dr Bentley wrote in an e-mail.

Why is my camera seeing more than my eye?

Technology’s lens is better than the human one when it comes to night vision. Basically, photoreceptors in the eye take two main forms, rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive to light but cannot detect colours. With enough light, cones kick in to determine colours.

“As you experience anytime you get up during the night, we don’t differentiate colours well when we are in a dark environment,” Dr Bentley wrote.

Cameras are more effective at sensing colour because they can handle a longer exposure than your eye, Dr Engle said.

“The digital detector that your camera has is most likely much more sensitive to red wavelengths of light than your eye is, and it’s going to pull out those longer, redder wavelengths much better,” he said.

And there are a host of other AI-based enhancements in cellphone cameras that can produce shots that once only high-end cameras could, including shooting many photos in quick succession and using technology to combine them for a sharper, more colourful and clear image.

So, are those photos of the aurora real?

Mr Douglas Goodwin, the Fletcher Jones Scholar in Computation and a visiting assistant professor in media studies at Scripps College in Claremont, California, published an article on this subject in May on the Conversation, a non-profit news site. In his article, Mr Goodwin stripped out the enhancements commonly made by smartphone cameras to produce two images of the aurora – one that approximated the naked eye and another taken with a phone camera.

“Phones are exaggerating it a bit, but not confabulating it completely,” Mr Goodwin said in an interview. “They’re seeing it better than we could.”

How can I photograph the aurora?

Stay up late. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lights are most active within an hour or two of midnight.

On her photo expeditions, Ms Stephanie Vermillion, a Cleveland-based astrotourism writer and photographer and the author of 100 Nights Of A Lifetime: The World’s Ultimate Adventures After Dark, said she will scan the horizon with her cellphone camera if she cannot see any activity, “because it does see them better than me”.

She sets the camera to shoot in time lapse mode (for iPhone users she suggests the app NightCap), then watches the display with her own eyes.

“If I’m constantly fiddling with my camera, I’ll ruin the moment,” Ms Vermillion said. NYTIMES