Seeing the Northern Lights from Maine

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine - Aug. 31, 2019 - PRLog -- Last night, we checked photographing the northern lights off of our bucket list and after posting some of the images to local groups, I received so many questions as to how to see them. Around here, the locals were sharing articles about how the Northern Lights will be visible in our area, I've seen these articles before - and sadly was not able to see the lights, but I was determined, after all the hospital here is called "Northern Light" so, it must be something to be seen here right? I frequent the Aurora Borealis Notifications Group on Facebook, and there I learned so much about chasing the Auroras which all came into play last night for our successful Aurora adventure. This is what we did to be able to photograph the northern lights;

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Location, location, location!

We chose a location with a wide open horizon facing north. Since we were out at night, our headlights were blocking our view of the auroras and so we had to fly blind and basically just park and wait. Once the car was off and it was pitch black, our eyes began to adjust and we were able to see the lights for ourselves.

Photographing the Aurora - Camera settings for proper exposure of the auroras
While I was setting up the tripod and DSLR, my husband took some photos of the horizon with his phone (Google Pixel 3XL) his images picked up the lights better than our eyes did, and so that is how I knew where to point my camera.

I'm no stranger to photographing the night sky, but this was my first time documenting the auroras, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I put my camera (Canon 5D MarkIV) into bulb mode with a "30 shutter speed and adjusted my ISO accordingly, I believe I was at about 2000. Since this is a long exposure shot, I needed to use a tripod to limit any kind of camera shake that could blur the image. I used the Canon Connect app to control the shutter of the camera (because if I press the button, that would have created a shake in the camera)

Using a phone to take pictures of the auroras is also definitely possible, on the Pixel we used night mode to be able to pick up the beautiful green tones.

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