What We See, What We Capture
The night we all became Hubble telescopes.
Like many, on Friday night the week before last, I stepped outside and looked towards the sky.
I had never seen the aurora borealis before, and the promise in the forecast had felt thrilling, despite knowing what a threat geomagnetic storms can pose to us here on planet Earth. In all honesty, I had fallen asleep on the couch at 9pm, put myself to bed thirty minutes later, and then spent the next hour and a half in out of sleep. Every time I rolled over towards the window, I would open my eyes in a bit of a haze and wonder if something was happening in the sky. In fact, something was happening: a few days past the new moon, a beautiful sliver of a crescent was perfectly frame out my bedroom window.
Finally, on the third or fourth occasion of looking out and wondering whether or not the sky looked any different, I got up and went outside to the deck. On my way past the kitchen table, I grabbed my iPhone, having read that its camera would pick up on more colors in the sky than the naked eye. Standing outside in my bare feet, I held my phone up, not so much looking at the sky, but looking at it indirectly through the phone. As if I was a film director watching what was happening on screen as actors played out a scene.
There it was: an intense display of all kinds of greens, blues, purples, and even pink. It was stunning.
It felt so strange to be out here at night holding my phone high above my head, so I put it in my pocket and looked back up with just my eyes. What did I see here in my Pacific Northwest backyard? Some striations. A sense that something quite different than usual was taking place in the sky. A gentle flicker of soft pink and greens, only ever so noticeable if you were paying attention. The sliver of that golden crescent moon.
The phone on the other hand captured something else. A world of color. Luminous awe. A mysterious portal my eyes weren’t capable of interpreting.
What happens when we’re so used to a capture of something that we forget to pay attention to the real, the tangible, the sensorial?
Aurora. My Swedish grandmother’s middle name. Long before that, the Roman goddess of the dawn. In 1619 to describe the stunning display of unexplainable lights dancing across the night sky, astronomer Galileo Galilei combined two gods—Aurora and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind—to come up with aurora borealis. We also commonly refer to them as the Northern Lights, and on the other side of the world, aurora australis.
We’ve long been trying to understand this phenomenon, and the lights are entwined in myth and legend. In Australian Indigenous oral traditions, the occurrence is associated with “fire, death, blood, and omens.” Vikings believed that the lights were the reflections of the Valkyries’ armor, as they took slain warriors to Odin in Valhalla. During the Civil War, according to the Smithsonian, “the auroras—usually visible only in the north—were widely interpreted as signs of God's displeasure with the Confederacy for advocating slavery, and of the high moral stakes attached to a Union victory.”
No surprise that in our attempt to understand, humans have also been hard at work trying to document, to capture what has taken place in these night skies. The aurora has long an artist’s muse.
In 1901, Swedish painter Anna Boberg traveled to the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, first in summer, then in winter. Later in her memoir, she wrote of the aurora borealis:
…”when the full moon, like a sun made of ice, disperses the night of noon, when the aurora borealis flares among the stars and storm clouds and waves chase each other, when the Lofoten Wall forms a wondrous stronghold with bastions and towers of alabaster… and the sea becomes dotted with armadas of Viking ships. Return then, stranger, to behold the apotheosis of Arctic beauty and wilderness!”
There are many iconic artistic depictions of the aurora borealis that today make their way around the Internet. French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot drew them in pastels, compiling his work in a book The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, published in 1882. In 1899 Harald Viggo Moltke, a Danish artist, was asked to join an official expedition that was going to study the aurora and given the specific task of “accurately reproducing the various auroral forms in paintings.”
After the night I spent standing on my deck, I wondered how I would paint what I saw, immediately envisioning a canvas mostly covered in dark charcoal, textured smudges of gray and black with soft hints of color. In my notebook, with blue ballpoint pen I scribbled a horizon line of tree silhouettes, with wavy, electrical looking lines above.
Most of us aren’t going to the paints or the pastels or even the words. We just snap photos. We already spend so much of our lives viewing the world through a screen, the aurora borealis was primed to be a lauded event. No need to wish that you could see more, that the colors were more intense, or wonder what exactly is going on beyond all of those hazy striations—a camera can capture with crisp precision even what you might not be able to see yourself. It’s as if, for a night, we all turned into mini Hubble telescopes.
Are we capable of trusting and believing in a wondrous, mysterious world even if we can’t see it with our own eyes? Can we conceive of a reality and an existence even if we can’t see it right in front of us?
These days, this seems harder and harder. We find ourselves detached from our actual reality, more and more swayed by a perceived one instead. Our digital lives are an assortment of tiny compositions instead of the full picture. We do it every time we push the piles to the side of our desk so that we can capture a perfectly curated “creative mess.” Or when we share the final project of what we’ve worked on, while glossing over the ups and downs of what it took to get there. We make assumptions based upon what other peoples’ lives looks like, forgetting that there is no way to ever entirely understand how someone else sees the world, how they experience it.
We take so much of what we see at face value, forgetting that it’s only a capture.
Alastair Humphreys, who happened to miss the light show and was expressing his sadness about not having seen it, wrote this:
“Of course, it's nice to see the beautifully curated and composed photographs of the Northern Lights in magnificent wild landscapes - mountains and tents. But what's really struck me this morning is the joy I get from all the "crappy" phone photographs taken from suburban gardens and over the rooftops of busy towns. This shows me that people everywhere genuinely love the wild world and can be filled with awe and wonder by nature. But this doesn't happen often enough… What we can do so that every person on social media who was awestruck and delighted by the wildness of the Northern Lights last night can be connected to nature and all its wonders much more often, and therefore become engaged to ensure we don't screw it up?”
Where is our awe over the dandelions, the iridescence of a beetle when the sun hits it at a certain angle, the shadow of leaves cast on the street, or the hummingbird that manages to fly backwards?
I woke up the morning after the aurora borealis and did what a lot of us did: went to see what other people had shared. At first it was exciting. I mean come on, most of those pictures are stunning. The universe is COOL. Nature is amazing! After a few though, I had to ban myself from looking at any more for the rest of the weekend. I love a collective sense of awe and wonder as much as the next person, but all of a sudden, it felt so product-driven. As if we had all gone outside, snapped the amazing photo we knew would get a certain amount of likes, and called it a day.
I am not immune to any of this—I too have a lot of photos on my phone—but I was left feeling that the capture of the moment (at least in my neck of the woods) was somehow more captivating than the event itself. We obsessed over the end product, forgot about the process of getting there.
“When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring… even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat,” Nick Bilton wrote in Vanity Fair, about his experience of using the Apple Vision Pro. “In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality.”
I can’t help but think of what I saw in the capture of that Friday night celestial event as some version of augmented reality. There are all kinds of things that elicit a sense of awe, and photos do an excellent job at doing so, as anyone who has spent some time looking at NASA’s gallery will know. It’s important that we know that there are things beyond our peripheral scope, to see what our own eyes can’t see, in order to know that there is so much that is bigger than us. But in a visual world that’s more and more saturated and augmented, if we only have the digital experience, we risk becoming desensitized to the nuances, the small things, the everyday beauties. We risk only being moved by the extremes.
What happens when we’re so used to our screens that the world around us, the real world, begins to feel flat? What happens when we’re so used to a capture of something that we forget to pay attention to the real, the tangible, the sensorial?
On the night of the aurora borealis, I walked down to the water. I was curious if it was possible to see any of the slight forms and light that I saw in the sky reflected in the water. It wasn’t, and even the phone didn’t pick up on anything. Wearing a pair of shorts, I waded up to my thighs. The water was cold, but not bitingly so. It reminded me that evening summer swims are around the corner. The crescent moon kept descending, dropping closer and closer to the silhouette of the outcropping of land and trees on the horizon line.
When I finally turned to head back to the house, my footsteps threw splashes of water onto the dark rocky beach. It glittered. I dipped my foot in again, casting more water out onto the dark spot of land in front of me. There it was again. The sparkle of bioluminescence. Like a constellation of stars cast onto the wet, barnacle-covered rocks.
Entirely impossible to capture on my phone.
Only noticeable in the brief moment of a dark night.
-Anna
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It's so interesting you say this. Growing up in Alaska, I have seen the Aurora many times. They always seemed most vivid on the coldest nights! But the experience of them was always always always spiritual. The way they danced, I almost felt like they were making a sort of song. People would often ask me if I had seen them when they heard I was from Alaska and I'd always say yes and that any pictures they may have seen of them were nothing like what it was like to see them in real life. My husband had a similar experience going to Kenya in 2007. People would ask if he took any pictures and he hadn't. He just didn't feel that he could capture what he was seeing in a photo. Great reflections, as always, Anna!
Thank you for articulating how I felt about the phone vs eye experience of the aurora. I kept seeing photos, then looking at the sky, and when they did not match, I felt disappointed. But when I finally got still and looked closely with my naked eye, there it was, and it was even more glorious this way than in the photos—I was PART OF IT and it was a part of me. I swear I felt those undulations in my body for days afterwards.