How to photograph the northern lights

The aurora — the northern lights, aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the south — is charged particles from the sun striking the upper atmosphere and making it glow, most often in green, sometimes red, purple and pink. Where the Milky Way is fixed and predictable, the aurora is not: it depends on solar activity that’s forecast only a day or two out. So the honest way to think about aurora photography is as two separate jobs. One is being ready — under the right sky on a night it could happen — and that you can plan. The other is the camera craft. Nail both and you turn a lucky sighting into a keeper.

Where and when you can see it

The aurora forms in oval rings around the magnetic poles, so the reliable viewing is at high latitudes — northern Scandinavia, Iceland, northern Canada and Alaska in the north; the far south in the other hemisphere. The closer you are to those zones, the more often and the brighter it appears. During strong geomagnetic storms the oval expands toward the equator and the lights become visible much further from the poles — those are the events that put aurora over places that rarely see it.

That expansion has a limit, though — and what decides where the limit falls for you is your geomagnetic latitude, not the one printed on the map. The magnetic pole sits a long way from the geographic one, so two places on nearly the same map latitude are not remotely equal: a big storm reaches Chicago, and no storm on the scale reaches Madrid. Below a certain geomagnetic latitude — most of the Mediterranean, all of the tropics — there is nothing the sun can do about it, in any season, in any storm. Some places sit right on that line, close enough that the model cannot honestly call it either way; those are flagged as uncertain rather than handed a confident answer. The card below works out which side of the line your own location falls on — and everything after it assumes you are on the right side.

One caveat before you take a quiet answer as final. The geomagnetic model describes the Earth’s field well, but it is weakest in the far south — the sector covering Australia, New Zealand and southern South America. If you are chasing the aurora australis from there, read a negative verdict as the model’s best guess rather than a closed door, and check a regional aurora forecast as well. The southern lights are genuinely photographed from those latitudes.

Whether the aurora is active on a given night comes down to the sun, and it’s measured by the Kp index, a 0–9 scale of geomagnetic activity: the higher the Kp, the brighter the display and the further from the poles it reaches. Predicting Kp days ahead is a specialised space-weather forecast, and that part is not ours — watch a dedicated aurora/Kp forecast for it. Reading the current Kp is a different job: Viewpoint shows tonight’s value for a spot alongside whether the oval can reach it at all, and can alert you when the lights are actually out. What you can plan in advance are the earthly conditions that decide whether an active aurora ends up in your photo.

The four conditions to plan for

An aurora forecast that says “active tonight” is worthless if you’re standing under a cloud in a bright city. Four things have to line up, and these are plannable:

1. Darkness. The aurora only shows against a genuinely dark sky, so you need astronomical night — the sun well below the horizon (past −18°). That also means a season: near the poles the summer sky never fully darkens, so aurora season is roughly the darker months (autumn through early spring). One nuance worth knowing: −18° is the target for a faint display, but a bright aurora shows long before the sky is that dark — which is why Viewpoint’s alerts fire from nautical night (the sun past −12°) instead. Waiting for −18° would write off the first hour of a substorm at most mid-latitude spots. Both numbers are correct; they answer different questions.
2. No moon. A bright moon washes out all but the strongest displays, exactly as it does the Milky Way. Favour the nights around the new moon, or hours when the moon is below the horizon.
3. Clear skies. Cloud simply hides it. You want the opposite of a dramatic sunrise sky — as close to 0% cloud as you can get. This is the single most common reason a forecast aurora is a no-show for the photographer.
4. A dark, open northern horizon. In the northern hemisphere the aurora appears toward the north, so you want an unobstructed view to the north, away from town light-domes. (In the southern hemisphere, face south.) A weaker display may sit low on the horizon, so a clear line to it matters.

Get to a dark-sky location — the same low-Bortle sites you’d choose for the Milky Way — with a clean northern horizon, on a moonless, cloudless, astronomically dark night, and you’ve done everything within your control. The rest is the sun.

Camera settings for aurora

The aurora is faint by camera standards and, crucially, it moves — curtains ripple and shift over seconds. That’s the key difference from other night photography: your exposure has to be short enough to keep the structure crisp, or the whole thing smears into a flat green wash. Work in full manual:

• Aperture: wide open. Use your fastest aperture — f/2.8 or faster — to gather as much light as possible. This is the single most valuable spec in an aurora lens.
• Shutter: shorter than you’d think — 2 to 10 seconds. This is the aurora-specific rule. A bright, fast-moving display wants a short exposure (2–5 s) to preserve the sharp vertical rays; a faint, slow glow can take 10–15 s. Too long and the curtains blur into a featureless smear. Start around 5 s and adjust to what the sky is doing.
• ISO: high, and prepared to go higher. Begin around ISO 1600–3200 and push to 6400 or beyond for a faint aurora. Balance it against shutter: raise ISO rather than lengthen the shutter past the point the curtains blur.
• Focus: manual, at infinity. Autofocus fails in the dark. Switch to manual and focus on a bright star or a distant light using live-view magnification, then don’t touch it. Confirm your first frame is sharp at 100%.
• White balance: set it, don’t leave it auto. Around 3500–4000 K keeps the greens and reds honest and stops auto white balance from shifting the colour frame to frame. Shoot raw so you can fine-tune later.

A sturdy tripod is non-negotiable, a remote or 2-second self-timer avoids shake, and turn off any in-camera long-exposure noise reduction that would double your frame times and make you miss the display.

Composing it

The lights alone are a snapshot; give them a landscape. A strong foreground — a mountain, a cabin, trees, a lone figure — turns a sky record into a photograph and gives a sense of scale. Still water is the prize: a calm lake or fjord reflecting green curtains doubles the drama. Because you’re shooting wide and long anyway, the same discipline as the Milky Way applies — find the foreground in daylight, be set up before it starts, and keep shooting as the display evolves, because the best minute is rarely the first.

So: watch a dedicated aurora forecast for what the sun is likely to do, and let Viewpoint handle the rest — whether the oval reaches your spot at all and at what Kp, tonight’s reading and dark window, the light-pollution level of the spot and its clear-sky forecast, and an alert while there is still time to drive. So when the sun delivers, you’re already standing somewhere it can be photographed.

Quick-start checklist

• Get to a high-latitude, dark-sky site with an open, unobstructed northern horizon (south, in the southern hemisphere).
• Plan for astronomical night, no moon, and clear skies — and watch a dedicated aurora/Kp forecast for the activity itself.
• Shoot manual: fastest aperture (f/2.8+), ISO 1600–6400, shutter 2–10 s — shorter for bright, fast curtains.
• Manual focus on a bright star; confirm sharpness at 100%.
• Set white balance ~3500–4000 K and shoot raw; disable long-exposure noise reduction.
• Compose with a foreground and, if you can, a reflection — and keep shooting as the display changes.