Phone Camera Settings for the Northern Lights

iPhone (11 and later). Open the camera, point it at the sky, and wait. When the moon icon appears top left with a number beside it, night mode is on. Tap it and drag the slider to the longest exposure offered, usually 10 or 30 seconds. Thirty seconds only appears when the phone is completely still, which means it is on something. Turn flash off. Do not zoom.

Android with a Pro or Manual mode, which covers most Samsung, Pixel and Xiaomi flagships: ISO 800 to 1600, shutter 8 to 15 seconds, focus set to manual and pushed to infinity, white balance around 3,500 to 4,000K, and RAW on if it is offered. Pixel users can instead use Night Sight and let it run the full astrophotography exposure, which takes up to four minutes and works well.

Both. Wipe the lens. Turn the screen brightness down so it does not ruin your night vision. Use the timer or a voice command so you are not touching the phone when the shutter opens.

That is genuinely it. The rest of this page is why those numbers, and what to do when they do not work.

Ten years ago the answer to photographing aurora on a phone was that you could not. What changed is computational stacking: instead of one long exposure, the phone takes a burst of shorter ones and merges them, aligning frames and averaging out sensor noise. Apple calls it Night mode, Google calls it Night Sight, Samsung calls it Night mode. The technique is roughly the same.

That gets a phone to a genuinely usable aurora photograph, because the aurora is brighter than most people assume. The problem was never that it was too dim. It was that a small sensor collects too little light in a single 1/30 second frame. Stacking gets around that.

The thing stacking is bad at is movement. It works by assuming the scene is still between frames, and an active aurora is not still. On a quiet arc, a phone produces something close to what a camera would. During a substorm with rays moving visibly, the stack smears and the structure turns to mush. That is a real limit and no setting fixes it.

A ten second exposure handheld is a ten second blur. This is the single biggest difference between a phone photo of aurora that works and one that does not, and it costs almost nothing to solve.

A small tripod with a phone clamp runs about 15 to 25 EUR and is the best money in this entire hobby. Failing that: set the phone on a car roof, a fence post, a rock, or a rolled-up glove, and wedge it so it is pointing up. Anything rigid works.

Then do not touch it. Pressing the shutter shakes the phone for the first second of a ten second exposure. Use the three second timer, the volume button on your headphones, or a voice command. On iPhone the 30 second night mode option only unlocks when the phone detects it is completely stationary, so a tripod literally buys you more exposure.

Cold is the other thing. Below about -10°C a phone battery can drop from full to dead in twenty minutes. Keep it in an inside pocket against your body between shots, and carry a power bank in another inside pocket. A phone that has shut down in the cold usually comes back once it warms up.

Freeze fast movement. Any exposure long enough to collect the light is long enough to blur a moving curtain. A dedicated camera at ISO 3200 can take a three second frame and keep the ray structure. A phone cannot, because its sensor needs the time.

Hold detail in the shadows. Small sensors produce noise, and the stacking that removes noise also removes fine texture. Zoom into a phone aurora shot and the foreground is usually a smudge. That is why phone aurora photos look best with a simple, bold foreground: a tree line, a single cabin, a horizon.

Zoom. Digital zoom on a night shot is just cropping, and cropping a noisy stacked image looks bad. Shoot at the widest lens the phone has and crop later if you must. On an iPhone, the ultra-wide is often worse in the dark than the main lens, so use the main one at 1x.

None of that means don't bother. A phone photograph of a real aurora that you actually saw beats a better photograph you did not take. It just means knowing where the ceiling is.

Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt before deciding the sky is empty. Aurora at the southern edge of the oval reads as a pale grey-green haze, and people mistake it for cloud constantly. Take one ten second exposure pointed north. If the frame comes back green, it is aurora and your eyes have not caught up yet.

Put something in the foreground. A frame of pure sky is less interesting than the same sky over a tree, a cabin or a shoreline, and it also gives the stacking algorithm something fixed to align on.

Shoot more than you think you need. Aurora changes over seconds. The frame you take two minutes later is a different photograph, and the good one is usually not the first.

Then stop and look at it. The photograph is a souvenir of a thing you should mostly be watching with your eyes. Our full photography guide covers the dedicated camera side, and the app guide covers working out whether tonight is worth going out for at all.