Light Watch #2

After an hour spent in the library cuddling a warming glass of something naughty, I decided to risk one more venture up to the top deck. Whatever Nikki had been drinking was not warming enough to convince her to join me, so it was a solo expedition. 

One thing no-one tells you, until you set off on an Aurora watch, is how boring they are to the naked eye. Everyone's familiar with the stunning green curtains hanging over snowy mountains, sometimes with stars peeking through, sometimes hinting at pinks and purples along with the green. But - unless the display is really strong and dense - these colours are only visible with a camera. To the naked eye they're just grey. Almost indistinguishable from wispy clouds or mist.

So when I first set foot back on the Observation Deck, I thought it was still cloudy. Until I noticed around a dozen people all pointing their cameras and phones at the sky. And this is why.

This is the best of the dozen or so shots I took. I haven't cropped it or post-processed it in any way. I used the phone camera's "PRO" settings, as advised by the on-board experts. Minimum White Balance 2300K, maximum ISO 1600, manual focus set just one pip short of infinity. The only change I made was to pull the shutter speed back to 4s from the recommended 10. Ten seconds just gave me a uniform bright blue, and was in any case totally beyond the camera's antishake processing to make any sense out of the blur.

Even 4 seconds is a stretch, as you can see, but it is at least recognisable, and I'm happy with it. We didn't invest in any new photographic tech for this trip, but in hindsight, since my Galaxy S10 Lite is knocking on 3 years old, maybe it would have been sensible to use the excuse to buy a new one.

But better, and cheaper, would've been to bring along a decent tripod. That would be my #1 tip for anyone thinking of doing a trip like this.