[mskullcap]

That's nonsense. I have worked in remote northern locales for years as a geophysicist, and - the northern lights can be utterly amazing. You do not always need a long exposure camera to see them; they can be vivid, dancing and mesmerizing in reds, purples, whites and greens. Sounds like the sun wasn't active when you saw them. I have seen such incredible displays it was unnerving - with the entire sky shimmering in pockets of bright green whisps of light, and purple bands of light shining down upon me as I stood on a frozen lake on a cold, crisp night.

[supermw]

I want to believe, but I'm skeptical. Without any actual metric to measure how amazing the lights look, you have to rely on people's subjective opinions. One person's "amazing" light show could just be faint wisps to someone else.

I also think that pretty much any photo is going to look more intense that what anyone can see in real life. Look at the main photo in the article. The lights are so bright that the ground is illuminated green. Really? I doubt the lights can be such a strong light source. They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal.

I could perhaps believe that under the right conditions and dark adaption a human could see the lights a bit more colorful instead of just white, but I don't see how the sky could dance with clear and crisp ribbons of green and purple for miles unless the solar activity was so strong all our electronic hardware was being fried. (A long time ago there was an event so strong the lights could be seen all the way down near the equator, luckily before we had computers)

[Broken_Hippo]

I've taken pictures of them with a cell phone. I don't get them all the time here in Trondheim, Norway, but a few times a year. The cell phone degraded the site, in no small part because it intensified the city lights.

Yes, I'm in the city.

I've seen one snake brightly and I've seen some just shimmer in the night. I've seen purple and white and green. I've also seen some that were more impresive than others.

But none of this matters because you won't believe personal testimony, and at this time in your life, you haven't spent a decent amount of time in a northerly location during autumn. Rent a cabin up north for the month of October and possibly the beginning of December. And I'll add, just because you don't understand how such a thing happens doesn't mean you are being lied to about this stuff. It only means that you haven't seen it, are untrusting, and that you don't understand it.

[kaybe]

It's definitely green (and a little blue and red if you're lucky). You'd have to be massively colourblind to not see this. The ground though.. just like with the moon, it's still greyish, that part is usually from long exposure (so the photographs with a bright ground are suspicious indeed, same for blurred (or line!) stars).

The strong lights can be moving quite fast, so they're more blurred even in pictures with low acquisition times.

But again, it's hear-say as you say. Here is a more official scale for brightness:

https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/polar-aurora-brightness.html

edit: Actually, the first picture in the article looks pretty realistic!

[exDM69]

I live 60 degrees north, where Aurora are common but usually underwhelming, difficult to distinguish from clouds in city lights. But when a big solar storm hits, it's a spectacular show even this far south.

Further up north they are more common and more spectacular.

And it's definitely green and doesn't look like anything else when it's bright enough.

[balabaster]

They really do light up the ground green on occasion. I've seen it with my own eyes. First hand. I'm not being subjective about this. As a photographer myself, I don't have the photographic skill, nor the post production skill to have done it justice. It was magnificent in the truest meaning of the word.

[4ad]

> They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal.

The is completely wrong and backwards, the lights are very textured, but they move rather fast, something you see with your own yes, but something you can't capture in a photograph because of the long exposure, which blurs out details.