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Alright i have an extremely low stakes bone to pick!
So I live in southern Canada, and like many people we got Northern Lights the other night. Except - our northern lights consisted of a greyish haze basically. Yeah you could see something, it was cool! But it wasn't colorful.
Then, when you took a picture with your phone, that monochrome grey turns into a brilliant symphony of color, perfect for social media! But, it's basically a lie - I assume AI upscaling of some kind. And now I'm seeing all these photos from the US/Mexico Border, other southern states, of these brilliant reds and greens and I'm like, is everybody comfortable just lying like this? Surely they didn't actually see any color IRL, right? Did anybody actually see real colors outside of the phone AI upscaling, in any areas of the continental USA?
The Northern Lights just aren't very bright as we're seeing them right now. Also you probably live in a city and are suffering from haze & light pollution, which makes it tough.
I'm out of town, pretty far south and can see them not bad at the moment if I go outside and let my eyes adjust for five minutes first -- but they are quite dim compared to what I've seen during actual Northern winters.
ROV is correct that the reason phone pictures turn out more impressive is camera settings -- mostly exposure time is what I'd crank if I wanted a nice picture with a manual camera, but iphones are probably cranking the iso as he says. But if you go someplace really dark you can probably see them better.
I am lucky to live in a small city with a relatively decent dark sky (can see multiple constellations on a given night), but it's still not ideal for sure
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Not AI, and not upscaling. Whenever we look at something in real time, what we can see is limited by how much light can get to our retinas and hence to our brains. We can control this a little bit, through dilation of pupils, but the effect is limited. Similarly, we can't make our brains more light-sensitive than they already are, as we're optimized for normal daytime viewing. A camera doesn't have this limitation. SLRs can use aperture and shutter speed to make things more or less visible than they are in the real world, but phones aren't sophisticated enough for this. What phones (and SLRs as well) can do is make the digital sensor more sensitive by cranking up the ISO settings. Most photographers try to shoot with low ISO settings because cranking these will result in digital noise, but people shooting with their phones aren't this picky. If you're shooting at night, most automatic settings will crank the ISO to something most amateur photographers would consider ungodly. While this does have some effect on image quality, it also means that the camera can see more than your eyes can. The same effect could be achieved on color film by taking a long exposure, though this may cause star trails or other (potentially) unwanted artifacts. Most (all?) of those cool space photos of nebulae and other deep field objects aren't anything you'd be able to see with the naked eye, but are achieved by letting a lot of light in, using software to stack photos, and other camera tricks. This isn't to say that you're being lied to by "enhancements"; everything you're seeing is actually there, our visual systems just aren't equipped to see it in real time.
The film analog of ISO is actually ISO. Films come with different sizes of silver halide crystal grains. Bigger grains collect light faster and are therefore more sensitive, at the cost of having your photo be grainier. The biological analog would be if we could increase the size of our rods and cones at will to gather more light per cell.
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Same here, my husband was grumbling that his iPhone got a better look at the lights than he did.
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For me it was a very faint red in person but a very dynamic show in photos. This is also just typical of iphone photos at night which more or less never show what I want them to in the dark. I assume there's settings I can fiddle with to make it correct but I've never bothered.
I don't think it's AI upscaling so much as what the phone does to try to make things visible in low light. When I try to take a picture of the moon it comes out screwy as well.
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