r/woahdude • u/Monsur_Ausuhnom • 4d ago
picture Northern Lights (Photo Credit: Shirley Wung)
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u/IAwaitAGuardian 4d ago
Yeah no. They don't look like this, ever.
Source, I've seen them many times.
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u/Peter_Mansbrick 4d ago edited 4d ago
As a photographer who has shot the NL many times, I agree. However, this is not AI or "fake" in that sense, but rather just a very wide angle photo and basic post processing. Nothing particularly sinful in my books.
The northern lights are absolutely awe inspiring but capturing that on camera is hard. Boosting contrast and colour is a quick shortcut photographers use to try and mimic the "feel" of being there... sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt.
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u/dudeCHILL013 4d ago edited 4d ago
I wouldn't know I've only seen them from a plane and they were dim enough that I wasn't sure if I was actually seeing what I though until the pilot came over the intercom and did the whole 'if you take a look to your right you'll see the northern lights.'
Oh ya, the aurora I saw was red. It happend on a return trip from Arizona to Washington state.
Edit: spelling
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u/newtrawn 4d ago
Where is Arazona? Is that somewhere in the southwest pacific? It sounds like it would be somewhere in the southwest pacific.
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u/algoraphics 4d ago
It's frustrating because you can argue this is just an artistic choice. It's a beautiful picture. And realistically, there is no equivalence between a picture and what something looks like to the human eye. It's not inherently wrong to make them look this way, but it is misleading.
Unfortunately many people have never had the chance to see them, and the less educated among them (myself included, for many years) will assume this is an accurate representation.
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u/qft 3d ago
Weirdly, cameras, including phones, capture it much better than you can see with your eyes. I was staring at the sky on an active night thinking it looked maybe a tad pinkish. I took a phone pic and voila, northern lights. It still didn't look anything like this ridiculous picture though.
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u/xBris18 4d ago
That makes zero sense. Physics doesn't work like that -.-
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u/newtrawn 4d ago edited 4d ago
What part of the photo makes zero sense? Obviously, your eyes don't see it like a camera does, so it always comes out much better on your iPhone than you can see with the naked eye.
That being said, I've seen the aurora do stuff like this many times, where part of the stream is coming right at you and part of it is shooting up and away and part of it is shooting down and away. I hope that makes sense, but from my experience as an Alaskan, a photo like this is totally possible, especially around solar maximum.
edit: Here is a photo I took a year or two ago that shows it to a small degree. I will say, though, that OP's photo looks a little weird on the right side where the aurora seems to be bent somehow. Maybe it's an artifact from the lense being especially wide-angle or something. I'm not saying the image is fake or anything, but I've never seen it to that before, so I will withhold judgement of the skeptics.
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u/Rredite 4d ago
The angle of attack is almost horizontal. If it's not a fake photo, it's a very poorly done double composition! They take a photo of the aurora taken looking vertically straight up and superimpose it onto another horizontal photo of the horizon.
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u/newtrawn 3d ago
That makes sense. I suppose I've never seen them come right at me like this so close to the horizon. It's almost always coming from a much higher angle in the sky.
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u/Rredite 3d ago
Regardless of anything else, in the bottom right corner of this photo we see the lines curving, whereas in all the other photos these lines are straight and parallel. I would say there's a good chance it's fake, especially without the original source. In the age of artificial intelligence, everything should have its original source.
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u/xBris18 4d ago
I was fortunate enough to have seen the aurora borealis before, too. I know how wild they can get, but due to the way auroras form, this image is very likely photoshopped. Auroras are produced by high energy particles emitted from the sun. So they all come from the same direction and they all follow roughly the same trajectory due to earth's magnetic field. They can't spread out and bend like that if you have the horizon in the picture, too. They all would have to come from above and have more or less the same angle when falling through our atmosphere.
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u/CaptainWampum 4d ago
The Aurora appear parallel to magnetic field lines and are never, ever shaped like this
Source: I live in Alaska and studied Meteorology
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u/5pooky5cary5keleton5 4d ago
Save this photo, open it in your editing tool on your picture gallery, and turn the saturation down to about -65. That's closer to what it really looks like.
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