It's not an Instagram filter, it's exposure time. I set my camera on night mode and it took pictures during 4-10 seconds and the results were incredible

But even with the naked eye the lights were incredible last night

We arrived to the park before sunset and the biggest display was right when it became dark enough and a lot of people started arriving 2-3 hours later after watching pictures of other people and they were complaining that it didn't look as magical as the pictures. Lots of those people who arrived late were also using flashlights and just taking pictures of using their phones, not letting their eyes get used to the dark conditions or even really looking at the sky

Let me just say it bugs me when people apply filters to natural phenomena or pictures of animals because it alters my perception of how these things really look.

A little tweaking to improve clarity or contrast sure, but I’ve seen landscapes completely colorized in a way that almost feels like being lied to.

I can barely see it with the naked eye, but my night sight android camera makes it bright reddish.

Some posters will have modified the image but not all.

I think the biggest disappointment I had after moving to Alberta was finding out the Aurora Chaser groups use high exposure for all of their images and the actual aurora just looks like white beams most of the time. I do see green from time to time, but you need to go to dark-sky preserves or the fuckin' Yukon to see the good ones.

Aurora photos are a real circle-jerk of dishonesty.

I was out in north London from 10:30 to 11:30 and I didn't see a thing.

Finally someone pointed it out 😁 I love very far north and we have these almost every night (except now to August, as it never gets dark) and everyone simply posts enhanced versions, that you never see like that.

I used the night sight camera mode on my phone to get some pretty cool shots.

Meanwhile my entire state in the US is covered in clouds.

I have the opposite thing when I take a picture of the moon... Looks brighter, bigger and more detailed to my naked eye than it does on film even with proper exposure and stuff. Always have to touch it up just to get it to look right.

I am all with you on editing images and creating a "fake" reality on social platforms.

But this poses the question: how much has digital tech become part of our perception and is digitally enhancing a picture really much of a difference if it just helps us see more of the actual reality? I don't think increasing exposure and contrast is changing reality, it just squeezes down what we cannot see so easily and makes it visible in that narrow slit that our human perception can actually process. We use digital editing nowadays that it has become part of our whole process of perceiving reality, so much so that the digital picture litterally replaces what we saw with our eyes - simply because digital photography has become an extension, much like glasses, shoes, cars are litterally a part of our body.

Imho as long as it doesn't create pixels from scratch that weren't there in the first place, it is still viable to polish a picture of the sky to make it more appealing. I mean no buttcheeks were enhanced here, no eyes replaced or lips turned i to a grotesque sausage mouth freakshow 😅

Depends on where you live too. I can see the northern lights where I'm at pretty regularly anyway but last night they went all kinds of crazy.

Don't try to tell me what I saw with my own eyes the other day. I've seen aurora before, plenty, but not like that.

My photos with my Samusung looked like the top picture and my brother's with an iphone looked like the bottom picture, neither of us did any manual editing.