I was in Northern MN a couple years back when there was some decent aurora https://imgur.com/a/nBjdhZ9

What the camera caught was really impressive! Even with just a couple seconds exposure on a phone. But what the human eye saw was.... effectively a portion of the sky that was unusually bright and seemed to have some sort of movement. Like you stared at it and knew something was amiss, but nothing "impressive" to look at.

Come to the arctic circle during polar night, then you will see impressive.

A couple of years ago in the middle of Norway (not south, not north, in-between) me and a friend saw in the news that there would be aurora borealis, which is not common in that part of Norway.

We were outside at like 2AM in the night that day trying to spot it but could see any hint of it for the life of us.

Finally we used his phone and long exposure to see what it would pick up and on the captured photo we saw shades of green like aurora borealis.

Quite fascinating, it was.

For what it's worth... growing up in Tromsø, we have auroras a few dozen times per winter usually.

They were always strong enough to be easily seen, often quite dramatic. It really does look like that if you're far enough north.

For sure. As mentioned though we were in the middle of Norway, not north.

Well, actually the proper term for where we were at is East Norway. And I guess by official standards the middle of Norway is further north than where I consider the middle of Norway to be.

To be very specific, we were in Gjøvik.

Here's a few crappy phone pics from near Oslo on a night (evening, around 19 I think) it was very visible with the naked eye. 0.5 seconds exposure.

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_sea...

That’s awesome! Wish I get to see it that visible too.

I was lucky enough to be in Tromsø in February 2013 during the last solar cycle maximum. It was absolutely amazing, even a local who we happened upon near one of the fjords while he was cross country skiing - in the middle of the night - said that he had never seen such aurora. They were gold and purple along with the more common greens and reds that we had seen all week.

Human eyes are basically black and white in low light since rod cells can't detect color.