Anyone staying up to try and glimpse the Aurora Borealis?

[Tonkerbea]

I'm South East, but it's on my bucket list to see it in real life 🤞🏽.

For those wondering about the eye/camera thing - our eyes work with two types of light sensor - cones and rods. Cones detect colour and rods brightness. When light is dim the rods do all the work - basically we see in black and white in the dark.
cameras dont gave this division.
I’ve seen northern lights so bright with the naked eye we initially thought it was some kind of chemical leak or alien invasion but it’s usually much dimmer.
to see the light with your eyes you need to be well away from artificial light but also each time you use a camera or look at a phone screen or use a torch it takes minutes for your eyes to readjust again so the more you look at your phone the less you see with your eyes.

Peak district taken with camera phone but very visible to naked eye as well

Couldn’t see anything with the naked eye at 1am but beautiful photo with camera in night mode.

@poppymango I've heard they'll be back tonight but maybe not as bright. I used night mode on my phone camera. Hope you see them!

I shall plan a late night picnic in the park 🥰

I'm not far from you, I wanted to go up to the Moors, but no one else in the house was up for it😂.

Gloucestershire here. Got up in the middle of the night to have a look, but all I could see was a glow on the horizon which may have been something to do with it, but not a proper aurora. Impressive orange crescent moon though.

Gutted to have missed this last night. I was getting an early night due to feeling fatigued from Norovirus the night before.

Seeing all those Facebook photos have made me feel a little envious, but hopefully they will come out again tonight.

If you missed them, they should be visible again from 10pm tonight 😀

Okay so I was up and outside in the middle of the countryside last night at 00:30, perfect starry sky and no light pollution… on social media people near where I live were posting lovely purple photos, but I saw nothing! How?!! There was a sort of misty grey haze across the northern sky, but no colours at all and I stared for at least half an hour!
Can anyone think why - perhaps I wasn’t on high enough ground? Or did they come and go and I was just unlucky? I am so annoyed!!

it was visible in Surrey last night

Tonkerbea · Yesterday 22:05

Would love to see pics if anyone manages to spot them

Whitley Bay last night, about 9:30.

From just outside of Edinburgh

Did you try taking a picture of the misty grey haze?

You need to look through phone camera ideally on night mode

@Allthesea you need to look through a camera - you won't see the colours in the photos via the naked eye.

Phone camera on night mode with 10 second exposure worked great for me.

We saw an amazing red vertical stripe with green at the base, with almost sunbeams but grey streaking the sky - all visible to the eye, but more spectacular once photographed. This was home counties. Just glorious

I never thought they'd reach the south east coast, but they did.

The yellow bank of lights on the right of the picture is Hastings Pier.

I had a beautiful view in Kent, we were all hanging out of our loft room windows

Love all these pictures.. we need these positive beautiful things to happen in this life where so much shit happens. Can't believe people are mocking people for enjoying it (I've seen on some fb posts)

No I didn’t! Because I didn’t realise there was anything to photograph, it’s only really now that I’m considering the haze could have been the lights, but at the time I was looking for colours, as I’m sure most people were!
How did everyone else know to take a photo of something they couldn’t see?!

Yes, correct. It's going on for 4:30am here, sky a bit lighter now with sunrise coming. I can see stars in the sky and look up and see the Big Dipper, but looking through my camera I can still see a very faint green haze across the sky and it's as if the stars are gone.

How did everyone else know to take a photo of something they couldn’t see?!

If you join the Aurora groups on Facebook there's tonnes of free advice about getting photos.

What you can see by eye in the UK is minimal even during an intense storm - cameras can pick up so much more.

@Allthesea It was all over facebook, people saying point camera at it. I hate social media these days but that was a positive 😂 That grey band you saw was it! Plus the rest of the sky filled with colour too

So beautiful 🤩