Why the northern lights look amazing in photos—and very dull in person.

I'm a meteorologist who lives in Minnesota, unequivocally one of the best places to see the northern lights without having to travel to Alaska or Iceland or freaking Svalbard. When I first moved here, about 10 years ago, I thought I was gonna love seeing the northern lights. After all, Minnesota is the northernmost of the Lower 48 states. Our women's soccer team is the Aurora . Our sole national park, Voyageurs, has a whole section devoted to seeking out the northern lights . Our new state flag even goes hard on the Arctic vibes . Surely I was in for many nights of taking in the wonder of a rapidly shimmering ectoplasm-green alien lava lamp.

I couldn't have been more wrong. I got a few distant glimpses during the first few years I lived here, a gray-green smudge on the horizon. Huh, I thought, cool, but I bet it's gonna be so much better on a really good night.

It wasn't.

If it seems to you that the northern lights have been in the news a lot lately, that's because they have. We're in a period of increased solar activity, and there was another big show last Thursday night, with aurora borealis visible as far south as Texas, San Diego, and Mazatlan. So you're forgiven if you're developing a bad case of northern lights FOMO .

On May 10 of this year, during a Super Bowl of northern lights shows , I drove an hour north of the Twin Cities and met up with a friend and his kids in a wetland where we heard spring peepers and a whip-poor-will, and waded through the spring grasses to an open field a few minutes after midnight. It was an idyllic night. The aurora filled the entire sky, swirling overhead for hours, with the peak of the show actually in our southern skies. Apparently, it was visible as far south as the Caribbean, objectively one of the best northern lights shows of the past 500 years, according to NASA. But to the naked eye, on this night of nights, away from the light pollution of the cities, it was still just a slowly moving green-gray smudge, only there was just a lot more of it.

In person, the northern lights are, and let me stress this in the strongest possible terms, nothing at all like the photographs. During that trip to the wetlands, I was not basking in the glow and wonder of the universe—or even looking at anything particularly stunning. Instead, I found myself constantly trying to take pictures, and ruining my night vision in the process, just to see what was happening. I know now that this was, for all intents and purposes, the best it ever gets.

Almost every photo or video of the northern lights I've ever seen is deeply misleading. I've been in Minnesota for almost one complete solar cycle . I've attempted to see the northern lights dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Not once has reality even remotely matched my expectations.

Big Aurora would have you believe that if you just book a flight to Fairbanks, check in at your $350/night cabin , grab a hot chocolate and chunky sweater, look up after sunset, then boom! You'll be whisked off to Arendelle. It's the rare and earnest aurora influencer who includes true-to-what-your-eyes-would-have-seen photos alongside their money shots. The naked-eye perspective simply does not match up to the brightly hued spectacle that can be captured on camera.

It turns out there's a pretty simple reason for this: Photos pick up wavelengths of light humans can't see and greatly enhance colors that are way too dim for your eyes to recognize in real time. My phone, a Google Pixel, even defaults into night mode when trying to take northern lights photos, stacking multiple exposures to sharpen and bring out colors we wouldn't be able to discern merely by gazing at the sky ourselves. In low-light conditions, "rod" photoreceptors in human eyes allow us to perceive the world , but solely in black and white. It's only in relatively bright light that we can even see color—excluding all but the most extreme northern lights shows, which are too dim for us to perceive in bright color. That's why photos of the northern lights are green, magenta, and red, and why you feel as if you're doing it wrong.

You're not doing it wrong. The northern lights are just mid.

Right now, the sun is approaching peak levels of activity, and it'll likely be the mid-2030s before we get another burst of solar flares, sunspots, and coronal mass ejections to rival what's happening at present. So even though I knew that the northern lights would be a letdown, I still tried my best to see them over the weekend. Here's my photo from my viewing , without the multiple exposures, just as underwhelming as I thought it would be. Sure, maybe if I traveled all the way to Finland, they'd be better? While I've only ever seen green, it is possible to see other colors with the naked eye , if still very muted compared to what's possible with a camera. But honestly, I can't wait for the sun to settle down so we can simply stop dealing with this. Unfortunately, the activity will continue for a while.

I mean, OK. It's intellectually interesting to know that the faint gray smudge barely visible on the horizon is the result of literal pieces of the sun that have been blasted toward you at hundreds of miles a second, funneled into our atmosphere by Earth's magnetic field and induced to emit light via graduate school physics concepts.

But it's also cool that, like, caterpillars can turn into butterflies and you can see Jupiter's swirling clouds with a cheap backyard telescope. The world is amazing, mesmerizing. By all means, find your thing in nature and fanboy to your heart's content. If smudges in the sky are your thing, sure, fine. This is an esoteric and specific interest, though, not something everyone needs to see in their lifetime. And instead of feeling envious of everyone's photos, we can feel a little smug that it wasn't that awesome at all.