I took this photo last night during our solar weather event. This is only the second time I’ve seen the Northern lights from the ground. (It’s a relatively common sight from the cockpit while crossing the North Atlantic, but I think you’ll forgive me if I don’t practice my photography during that time, ha!)
I am totally out to sea when it comes to taking or processing images like this. I probably could have done better with a tripod and lower ISO (at least the photo would have been level), but sitting the camera on my car door with the I.S. scope enabled to help me hold steady worked well for 4 second exposures, judging by the stars. I don’t really know how longer exposures would have turned out as the patterns were in motion and I wanted to see structure in the ribbons of light.
I used a beautifully wide lens, but one with a smallish physical aperture for a prime as it’s a small sensor camera. I thought it would be an interesting challenge here.
My attempt is using an outdated build of darktable master using AGX.
I like my version well enough, but I’m not happy with how the lower border of the red region to the far left came out quite blotchy. I wonder if I asked too much of too little captured information.
WOW!
I have to travel to see the aurora. But unfortunately I never had such intense ones.
If you exposure the northern lights for too long, you loose structures of the aurora. So in my opinion there is not much wrong with your capture. ISO 400 isn’t really high and not everyone is lucky enough to have a 1.7 f-stop for situations like this.
DT 5.3 AgX used. I tried a different white balance of incandescent because I have been told that 3200K reproduces aurora colors more correctly. I am unsure since I didn’t see the original scene if this is a good or bad idea. 2025-11-11 215049-7746.rw2.xmp (15.1 KB)
. Here’s my try. Did some retouching to get rid the cables
