The aurora is brighter to a camera than to your eye. A camera gathers light over seconds, so a faint grey glow that barely registers overhead comes back on the screen as a green curtain. That is the whole trick, and it means almost anyone can photograph the northern lights with the gear they already own, if they know the handful of settings that matter.
Camera settings for the aurora
On any camera with a manual mode, four things decide the shot:
- Aperture: as wide open as the lens goes. f/2.8 is great, f/4 is fine. A wide aperture lets the most light in.
- ISO: start at 1600, go up to 3200 or 6400 for a faint aurora, come down when it is bright. Higher ISO is brighter but grainier.
- Shutter: 5 to 15 seconds. Use the shorter end when the aurora is dancing fast so the shapes stay crisp, the longer end for a faint, slow glow.
- Focus: switch to manual focus and set it on a bright star or a distant light, then leave it. Autofocus hunts in the dark and fails.
How to photograph the aurora on a phone
Modern phones are genuinely good at this. On an iPhone, Night mode switches on automatically in the dark. Prop the phone on something solid, let Night mode run its longest exposure, and hold still until it finishes. On an Android, open Pro or Night mode and set a long exposure the same way. The 2024 storms proved the point. Most of the images that filled the world that night were shot on phones.
Shoot a foreground
A bare green sky is less striking than you expect. Put something in the bottom of the frame, a tree line, a lake, a cabin, a person looking up, and the aurora suddenly has scale and place. The best northern lights photographs are landscapes that happen to have a burning sky.
The part most people get wrong
Settings are the easy half. The hard half is being outside, in the dark, pointed the right way, on the one clear night the aurora actually comes. That is not a camera problem. That is a timing problem, and it is the reason most people only ever see other people's aurora photos.
Be outside on the right night.
The best settings in the world are useless if you are asleep when it happens. Magna Earth watches the auroral oval over your exact coordinates and tells you the hour it crosses into your sky, so you are set up under it with time to spare, not scrambling after it is gone.
Know the night it reaches you — from $14/mo