NYTimes: So, are those photos of the aurora real?

Elaine Gusac interviewed me about taking photos of the Aurora with your smart phone. I said:

Douglas Goodwin, the Fletcher Jones Scholar in Computation and a visiting assistant professor in media studies at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., published an article on this subject in May on the Conversation, a nonprofit news site. In his article, Mr. Goodwin stripped out the enhancements commonly made by smartphone cameras to produce two images of the aurora — one that approximated the naked eye and another taken with a phone camera.

“Phones are exaggerating it a bit, but not confabulating it completely,” Mr. Goodwin said in an interview. “They’re seeing it better than we could.”