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MoBambaNYC OP t1_jault6t wrote

On the average night your camera is gonna see it better, on a really strong night your eyes see it better. It has to do with the rods in our eyes at night we don’t see color really well unless it is bright. Think of driving down a dark road all the cars looks dark until your headlight hits it, then you can see the color. But you not seeing the colors well is an optical illusion of sorts because the camera is capturing what’s actually there. The flip side is on a bright night like this one, your eyes see it better because the camera can only absorb so much info to its sensor before it turns everything white, what we call blowing out. This particular night the reds were so vibrant from the super dense solar winds that Ray Charles could have seen them.

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op_timus t1_javz7vx wrote

This is confusing me, wouldn't you just turn the exposure down to stop the aurora blowing out?

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MoBambaNYC OP t1_jaw38eb wrote

You try to, typically an aurora shot on an average night is 3-5 seconds. When it starts moving around even less because you want to capture the motion and if you leave the shutter open it just turns into a blob of color. This specific photo the exposure time was 6/10th of a second, and I had to lower the whites and highlights considerably in post to keep them from blowing out. When the aurora gets this bright, it’s like pointing your camera at a full moon basically.

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