Most northern-lights videos online are time-lapses, hours of photos squeezed into seconds. Photographer Kwon O Chul's Aurora Substorm – Real time motion is different: filmed near Yellowknife, Canada, on the night of 1 March 2013, it shows the aurora moving at the speed he actually saw it, curtains folding and racing across the sky above a camp of glowing tents.
Aurora Substorm: the real-time video
Kwon recorded the display between 22:25 and 23:50 local time. His own note on the film is blunt: "It is real time motion! NOT time-lapse. Brighter the Aurora, faster the movement." He shot it on a Nikon D4 at ISO 6400 with a 24 mm f/1.4G lens set to f/1.4 or f/2.0, testing a Canon 5D Mark III side by side and preferring the Nikon. He also points out the one figure who keeps running around while everyone else stands still and watches: the photographer himself.
Kwon credits the camera's sensor for making live aurora video possible, adding that a Canon 1D X, with a similar pixel size, may give similar quality. The result keeps the true pace of the sky, which is far livelier than any still photograph suggests.
What causes the northern lights?
According to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, most visible aurora is produced by electrons accelerated on the night side of Earth's magnetosphere. They stream down along magnetic field lines towards the polar regions and collide with oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. The excited atoms and molecules release that energy as light, typically 80 to 500 km above the ground.
Earth's magnetic field arranges the aurora into two ovals centred roughly on the magnetic poles. During strong geomagnetic storms the ovals expand, and aurora can be seen over most of the United States.
What is an auroral substorm?
Kwon's title is a scientific term. On an active night, quiet arcs in the evening often begin to twist and sway around midnight. At the peak of a substorm the arcs can expand to fill the whole sky and become very bright, which is exactly the explosive phase the video captures. Later, in the early morning hours, the display often breaks up into diffuse, cloud-like patches.
Why Yellowknife is a top aurora destination
NOAA says the best viewing lies under the auroral oval, roughly between 60 and 75 degrees latitude, where aurora appears on more than half of all nights. Yellowknife, capital of Canada's Northwest Territories, sits at 62°N on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, about 400 km south of the Arctic Circle, right under that oval. Aurora tourism is a major industry for the city of about 20,000 people.
You need darkness and a clear sky. The midnight sun rules out summer viewing at these latitudes, while December brings only about five hours of daylight. Dress for real cold: January averages around −26 °C in Yellowknife.
More northern lights on Snow Addiction
See another real-time film in Ronn Murray’s Alaska footage, compare it with Wes Eisenhauer’s night-sky time-lapse, or browse Mikko Lagerstedt’s Night II collection.
- Kwon O Chul’s Yellowknife Aurora Gallery
- Kaspars Daleckis’s Latvian Aurora Time-Lapse
- Ten Northern-Lights Regions: Geography, Darkness and Realistic Expectations
- Mike Taylor’s Maine Aurora Photography and a Change of Direction
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