Aurora Timelapse Tutorial & Flicker Fix

Last night I went outside to check my telescope's focus and noticed a glow on the horizon. Thinking it could be the aurora, I ran back inside and grabbed my DSLR and wide angle lens.

After a quick 10 second photo I could see the aurora borealis off in the distance, and figured it could make for a cool timelapse. I set the Shutter Speed to 10 seconds, ISO 1600, f/2.8, and an interval of 11 seconds. After capturing 240 images the interval stopped. That should be enough for a 10 second video.

I ran into a problem with my timelapse video though, it had an awful flicker. After a few hours of testing and research, I found the culprit. The Highlights and Shadows adjustments in Camera RAW were not applying consistently between every frame. (Even though it was the exact same settings.) This caused the flicker. Once I reset the Highlights an Shadows back to 0, the flicker was fixed.

In this tutorial I'll show my full process for creating an Aurora Timelapse.

00:00 - Intro
00:28 - Load Photos into Camera RAW / Lightroom
01:01 - Basic Edits
01:35 - Fix Flicker
03:42 - Finish Edits & Sync Settings
04:38 - Sharpen, Noise, Color Noise
06:13 - Finalize Image Style
07:43 - Save JPEGs
09:04 - Open Image Sequence in Photoshop
10:18 - Optional Edits
11:06 - Render Video
12:00 - Crop to 16:9
13:22 - Publish Final Video