The answer to this question is yes and no. The sensitivity of the best high
speed color films is so high that they can "see" at night
(exposure several seconds and a fast lens) better than the
human eye. The difference does not lie so much in sensitivity to light but in the
ability to perceive colors. While under very weak light intensity the human eye
does not see colors at all, the color film retains its ability to record
fully saturated colors. The color images of aurora as you can see them in
the photographs on the page top are, indeed, captured in their true colors.
The colors of the aurora borealis are highly saturated because the aurora
light consists of only a small number of monochromatic lights.
In this case it is the green and
red color
- spectral lines of oxygen atoms (as was
explained earlier). Given the
fact that the glow of the aurora is not very intense the human eye does
not take in the colors as rich as they actually are. The human eye's perception
is therefore more subtle and the colors are less saturated. This inspired me
to use my computer to make two versions of the same picture. They show
a panorama created by putting together two images from this page.
The
first version captures
the colors fully saturated, as recorded on the film. This is how we would
see aurora borealis if the lights were so bright that the human eye was
able to perfectly take in the colors (as it does at daytime).
The
second version of the picture was
computer processed (adjusted brightness, contrast and saturation) so that
the picture emulates, as much as possible, the perception when viewing
aurora with the naked eye. The perception is subjective since each of us
can see at night differently. The differences among various people are
much greater than with good illumination at daytime.
