Aurora Borealis is crazy awesome tonight

Tonight the aurora borealis is super active all over Maine. For me, it was not visible to the naked eye, but I could see it on the cell phone camera. It started out green (the most common color) from excited oxygen atoms from 60-150 miles in altitude.

I went outside from 6pm-7pm to photograph it from the front yard again. Had I been over at Caesar Pond, it would have been magnificent. I attached my cell phone to a tripod to get clear photos.

We had such a great light show with curtains of light shifting to and fro.

The sky was so clear and cold at 10F. My fingers nearly froze! I have the best neighbors who all turned their outside lights off so that I could have as dark a setting as possible.

I had a difficult time choosing which photos I liked best. Even though they are similar, you can see the shift of color over time. 

I took 3 second exposures often seconds apart.

I couldn't be more pleased with the iPhone 16 pro camera. It did a magnificent job with night sky photos.

Carrying a cell phone is so much easier than hauling around my DSLR cameras, especially for nighttime photography in winter.

Aurora Borealis

There was promise of the strongest aurora since the 2003 "knock your socks off experience". However, it did not materialize for us in our location of Maine. 

But, I did get to practice some nighttime photography with my iPhone 16 pro. And, I was totally pleased that my photos were in focus! Note: I did not get over to the south end of the pond to photograph the aurora looking north as I couldn't safely walk down the snowy side of the street in the dark. Nor could I break trail and tromp through the snow to the pond in the dark while carrying the tripod. So, I tromped a short trail to the middle of our front yard. Not optimal, but at least I got a few photos.

Geesh! It was windy out. I was thinking that I would need to sandbag my tripod legs, but they were stuck so far into the snow that I had good stabilization. We started out with a bit of cloud cover and a slight tint of red in the night sky. See the Pleiades star cluster at the top of the photo!

I was able to capture a bit of aurora activity looking northwest. I didn't last too long outside as it was so cold! My fingers were freezing and my knees were knocking!

Phone settings: I activated "Night Mode" by tapping on the moon icon. I tried to set the exposure time to 10 seconds, but it set itself to 3 seconds. That's okay... I tapped on the screen to set the focus lock. Then, I tried to set the timer for 3 seconds to avoid camera shake when touching the shutter button.