This is not much of a trip report, unless you consider driving two hours out of LA and barely leaving your car a trip.
There was a huge geomagnetic storm a few weeks ago and I saw online that that the aurora borealis was visible as far south as the Sonoran Desert, so I grabbed my camera and drove north to see if I could see it.
The only problem was that I had never tried to photograph the night sky before, and I didn't think to google tips until I was already outside of cell service range. So, I set my shutter speed to 30 seconds and pointed north. This is what I got.
By no means are these high quality images, but it was still exhilarating to look down at my camera and see the blotch of red. It was very strange to sit there alone in the cold mountains, gazing at something invisible to the naked eye but there just the same.
Next time I will try to figure out how to use my camera before I leave the house.
searching for the aurora in Los Padres
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abigailw
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dima
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Cool stuff. What did you conclude about camera settings? Open aperture, high iso, long, but not looooooong exposure? I play with it sometimes, but don't have the patience to spend the time to do it right.
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abigailw
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Haha well here's how amateurish my approach was...I have a Sony a7 I got secondhand from a friend and I could not for the life of me figure out how to adjust aperture in manual mode. I played with every single dial on the thing and couldn't do it. Extra ridiculous bc my sister is a professional photographer, but I couldn't call her for help bc I was out of cell range. Again, not very well planned out. So I just used shutter priority mode and did 30 second exposures. Probably too long because everything is blurry and you can see a bit of the movement of the stars. I was just glad that I was able to capture any color at all, and I got a nice evening in the mountains out of it.dima wrote: Wed Dec 03, 2025 11:32 pm What did you conclude about camera settings? Open aperture, high iso, long, but not looooooong exposure?
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dima
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The 5th shot is out-of-focus, I think? The rest look sorta like what I get. You probably want more sensitivity and/or a longer exposure, but then the stars move more. These experiments require patience. Send results if you go again!