Why are Northern Lights more colourful in images?

Let’s face it, you will never see the auroras the way they look in images.

It's a question we get almost every night: Why do the aurora appear colourful and vivid on my smartphone but greyish to the unaided eye?

The answer is the difference between our eyes and cameras.

At night, our eyes are virtually colour blind, unless the light source is bright and concentrated enough to activate, or stimulate, the cones that are the photoreceptor cells in the human eye. As a result, faint aurora displays will typically look grey or pale-green to the unaided eye. The colours are there, just a wee bit too faint to be seen by the human eye. 

Age also makes a difference, unfortunately. As we get older, our pupils become less responsive to light. Younger people tend to perceive auroral colours more easily than older people.

Eye vs camera

Cameras pick up the colours a lot more easily than the eye as they collect the light for a few seconds. Cameras are simply much more sensitive to faint light than the human eye.

When the solar wind is blowing faster or a geomagnetic storm occurs, the Northern Lights become a lot brighter. Only then they become bright enough for their gorgeous colours to be visible to the human eye.

Also keep in mind that you are more likely to see colourful aurora with the unaided eye from high latitude countries, such as Iceland.

The Northern Lights are never neon green to the naked-eye. That’s the result of bad editing of an image. The natural green aurora colour is more silvery as the image comparison shows. The lower image is edited to show how the lights appeared to the naked-eye.

More examples