If you’re looking for an awesome real-time video of the aurora borealis above Tromsø, Norway, you need look no farther than this surprisingly noise-free video taken by Anders Mildestveit:
What makes this video so fantastic? Well, the northern lights are notoriously tricky to film in real time, as most video cameras don’t function well at the high ISOs needed to capture the phenomena (i.e. the video captured turns out quite “noisy”). That’s why most of what we see on the net are timelapses. Yet with timelapse we don’t get a real feel for how quickly the aurora is actually moving. In Mildestveit’s video, we get to see it much as it would appear if we were standing right there (without the freezing cold and crackling to go with it).
Lucky for us, Sony’s full-frame A7S is one of those rare cameras that can hack it, and Mildestveit caught the beautiful aurora borealis spot on. The video above was shot in 1080P XAVC-S at 25600 ISO with no noise reduction applied! (Of course, the low noise could simply be a result of downscaling from 1080p video to 720p for sharing on Vimeo, but it’s still stellar, nonetheless.) He used a Rokinon 24mm T1.5 lens.
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Wonderful is not enough to express the magic in this shot. Speechless. It got to be fantastic for those people to live under the Aurora Borealis.