Guides
How to photograph the northern lights with a phone
A phone on a steady support, in night mode, will often record color your eyes cannot see. Here is what to set, and why it works.
Built by Radif Partners · rules checked · How the answer works · Editorial policy
To photograph the northern lights with a phone, put it on something that does not move, use night mode or a manual mode with a long exposure, focus at infinity, turn the flash off, and point it low toward the northern horizon. The phone works because it collects light for seconds while the eye refreshes many times a second, and because its sensor records color at light levels where human night vision sees only grey: SWPC's aurora tutorial notes that digital cameras are often more sensitive than the eye and can catch aurora and its colors when it is too dim to see. Keep exposures short enough that stars stay points: the photographers' 500 rule, a rule of thumb, gives about 19 seconds on a typical main lens and about 38 on an ultra-wide. Fast-moving rays blur sooner, so during a bright storm shorter is better. A dark spot and a clear northern view matter more than any setting.
How long can the shutter stay open?
Longest exposure before stars trail
19.2 s
| Same rule at 13 mm (ultra-wide) | 38.5 s |
| At 26 mm (main camera) | 19.2 s |
| At 77 mm (3x lens) | 6.5 s |
| Frames in a 3-minute night mode burst | 9 |
The 500 rule is a photographers’ rule of thumb, not a measurement: fast-moving aurora blurs sooner than stars.
Why the camera sees more color than you do
The light of the aurora is real and colored. Most of it is the green line of atomic oxygen at 557.7 nanometers, emitted between about 120 and 400 km up, with red from oxygen above about 300 km, according to SWPC's aurora tutorial. What differs is the detector. The human retina has two kinds of light cells. Cones see color but need fairly bright light. Rods take over in the dark and are far more sensitive, but they do not tell colors apart, which is why a moonlit landscape looks grey. A faint aurora stimulates the rods and not much else, so it appears as a pale band, sometimes mistaken for a cloud. SWPC's tutorial says exactly this: reports of white aurora are a manifestation of night vision, and only fairly bright aurora shows its true green and red to the eye.
Red suffers most. Rods are nearly blind to deep red light, and the eye's color cells are less sensitive to it than to green, so the high red glow of a storm seen from the south often goes unnoticed while a camera records it plainly. The National Park Service at Denali makes the same point for visitors: long exposures are better at detecting faint colors, and seeing red or purple by eye is rare.
A phone sensor sidesteps both limits. Each pixel sits under a red, green or blue filter at all light levels, so color is recorded whether the scene is bright or dim. And instead of refreshing its picture many times a second like the eye, the sensor adds up the light for as long as the shutter stays open, or the phone stacks many short frames into one. A few seconds of collected light are enough to make a glow that is barely visible look vivid. Keep that in mind when judging the sky: the picture is a true record of the light that was there, but not of what a person standing next to you saw.
Night mode, a steady support and a timer
On most recent phones, night mode is the easiest route. It takes a burst of exposures, aligns them and combines them, which reduces noise without needing a single very long exposure. Many phones lengthen the capture when they sense that they are held perfectly still, so the same shot taken on a support can gather much more light than one taken in the hand. If your phone shows an exposure time in night mode, let it run to the longest option it offers on a support.
Any support works. A small tripod with a phone clamp is the most practical, but a rock, a fence post, a car roof or a jacket rolled on the ground does the job. Use the self-timer, a voice command or a headphone button to trigger the shot, because pressing the screen shakes the phone at the moment the exposure starts. Turn the flash off: it lights only the few yards in front of you and spoils the frame. Turn the screen brightness down too. A bright screen costs you your dark adaptation, which the Park Service says takes at least 30 minutes to build.
Some phones also offer a manual or pro mode, where you can set the shutter time and the sensitivity yourself. That is useful once night mode has shown you what the sky holds. The exact menus differ from one maker to the next, so the safe advice is general: a long shutter, a high but not maximal sensitivity, focus set to infinity, and white balance left on automatic or set to a cool daylight value.
Focus and exposure
Autofocus struggles in the dark. It hunts, and it may settle on something close by. The aurora is at least 80 km away, which is optically infinity for a phone lens, so the goal is focus at infinity. Tap on the brightest star, a planet or a distant light on the horizon, then hold your finger to lock focus and exposure where your camera app allows it. In a manual mode, slide the focus to the far end and check a zoomed preview of a star.
The length of the exposure is a trade between light and sharpness. Earth's rotation moves the stars across the frame, and the longer the shutter stays open the more they streak. Photographers use the 500 rule as a starting point: 500 divided by the 35 mm equivalent focal length gives the longest exposure in seconds before stars visibly trail. The mini-simulator above applies it to any lens. It is a rule of thumb, not physics: it was devised for film and smaller prints, and on today's sharp sensors trails show up sooner. The aurora itself also moves. A quiet arc can sit still for minutes, but active rays change shape in seconds, and a long exposure turns them into a smooth smear. When the sky is bright and moving, use shorter exposures and accept a little more noise.
The ultra-wide lens is usually the best choice. It covers more sky, it allows longer exposures under the 500 rule, and the aurora often stretches across a broad arc of the northern horizon. The telephoto lens gathers less light and needs much shorter exposures.
Framing, cold and condensation
From the northern states the aurora is usually low in the north, so frame the horizon and leave most of the picture for the sky. A lake, a ridge line or a single tree in the foreground gives scale. Keep streetlights, car headlights and phone screens out of the frame: on a long exposure they flare and wash out the faint glow.
Cold is hard on phones. Lithium-ion batteries deliver less charge when they are cold, so a phone that shows plenty of battery indoors can shut down after a few minutes at well below freezing. Keep it in an inside pocket between shots and carry a spare battery pack. When you go back indoors, leave the phone in a closed bag for a while: warm, humid indoor air condenses on a cold phone and on its lens.
Finally, the light has to be there. The tonight forecast tells you whether aurora is possible from your town and at what hours, the best time guide explains the season and the Moon, and the colors guide explains why storms seen from far south often photograph red.