“I immediately saw the colors when I arrived and it was madness. I still have a hard time realizing that I actually saw this with my own eyes. It’s a bit like a dream.” Simon Bugnon, a nature photographer based IN Aubenas, is barely recovering, three days later, from the northern lights that he admired at the Col de Mézilhac, in the Ardèche mountains, during the night from Friday to Saturday. The images he captured are magnificent but do they represent what he saw with his eyes? Not exactly.
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“The perception of colors is much more subtle. The eye guesses them more than it sees them as distinctly.” Simon Bugnon is a professional photographer, based in Ardèche, for around fifteen years. “A photo is the capture of a certain quantity of light which never corresponds to that which is perceived at a precise moment by our eye.” That night, he took pictures for seven hours. Each photo requires a pause of two to five secondsdepending on the time of night and the intensity of the Northern Lights. “It reveals colors more sensitively than the eye can perceive.”
“Still a very significant difference”
Baptiste Falque is a forecaster at the operational space meteorology center in the Alps, recently created in Grenoble. He supports the words of the Ardèche photographer: “It is a difference simply in sensors, ability of our eyes to perceive weak light well. Our eye records light instantly while the camera takes long pauses. He is capable of storing much more light before releasing it. So there will always be a very significant difference.”
The space weather specialist adds: “There is also a very big difference compared to observation sites.” The best thing to be sure of a high point of view, with a clear view and as little surrounding light pollution as possible. And among the darkest areas of France: Ardèche!
Around forty episodes of the Northern Lights in France
We don’t see the Northern Lights in France more often than we might think. Over the last twelve months, between May 2023 and May 2024, there was 43 possibilities to see. But Baptiste Falque immediately counters this: “Half of the time the weather wasn’t good. In the other half there was the moon giving off too much light. Then in the other half there were clouds so you couldn’t see them. .” The chances of admiring the spectacle of the Northern Lights are therefore reduced quite quickly. Finally, the forecaster concludes: “It’s rarely this intense” than what the lucky ones were able to see this weekend.
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