Roi Levi is an award-winning star photographer. He doesn’t snap celebrities; rather, he takes “out of this world” photos of the sky and leads astrophotography tours around Planet Earth.
Lately, the Ashdod resident is focusing his lens on the Icelandic northern lights (aurora borealis), an electrical show caused by geomagnetic storms carrying solar wind particles to the Earth’s atmosphere. The particles collide with atmospheric gases, creating brilliantly colored rays, spirals, flickers and streamers.
Why now? Because it’s the middle of the two-year “solar maximum” occurring every decade or so. There’s no better time to capture magnificent aurora images. NASA even chose one of Levi’s works at its Astronomy Picture of the Day.
“Last May was the most intense solar storm in the last 25 years, and that’s when the scientists said we reached solar maximum. It was seen across Europe and even in New York,” Levi tells ISRAEL21c.
His astrophotography workshops attract professional and amateur photographers, as well as hikers, from Israel, the United States and from as far away as Hong Kong. He’s led four trips this year for four or five participants at a time and has more booked for 2025.
Levi says his secret to success in this very narrow niche is knowing how to “chase” the aurora by constantly monitoring space weather maps.
“I have friends who’ve been to Iceland two or three times this year and didn’t see it at all. The last four trips I guided, everybody saw it – on the last trip, they saw the aurora nine days out of 10,” he says.
“When you chase the aurora, you have to be dynamic. You have to have a moonless night and be in the right place at the right time.”
If he’s booked a hotel in eastern Iceland and suddenly detects a sun blast coming from the south, he’ll move the group and shoulder the expense of canceling one hotel and booking another.
“You have to know how to chase the light — and how to lose money,” he quips. “When I’m doing aurora photography, my goal is to gather more light, not more money.”
While leading a Deep Space Photography Workshop under disappointingly cloudy skies in Utah last July, Levi saw there was going to be a strong aurora storm in northern California, so off they went to photograph it.
“We just check out of the hotel and go to where the conditions are best,” he says.
Strongest geomagnetic storms ever
Levi says the geomagnetic storms of the past year have been the strongest he’s ever seen.
“Aurora intensity is measured by the Kp index, a scale of 1 to 9. Starting at Kp5 it’s called a geomagnetic storm level 1, or G1. Solar maximum is Kp9/G5. It’s so strong, the aurora is pushed from the pole to a lower latitude, and you can even see it in Europe and North America.”
In September at Víkurfjara Black Sand Beach in Iceland, Levi documented an astounding Kp8/G4. The video is below.
“Normally the light bursts from a single direction and evolves from a bow to a crown or corona above your head. You see a lot of green and white light. But the KP8 was bursting all over the sky in a full spectrum of green, red, purple and pink. There were a lot of small crowns, like a regular aurora multiplied a thousand times.”
The light was so intense that he and everyone in his group still saw it behind their eyelids when they went to sleep that night.
I ask him if it’s safe to look directly at the northern lights. “Nobody really knows if looking at this magnetic charge affects your eyes or your brain,” he replies. “When it strikes earth, it has damaged satellites and electricity… and our brain works with electricity.”
The cameras that he uses and lends his students are astro-modified. This means the camera’s color-limiting filter has been removed so that it can capture a strong aurora’s wildly vibrant frequencies at the upper part of the red spectrum.
Trips and exhibitions
When he’s not chasing northern lights around the globe, Levi does other kinds of photography, such as microphotographs of live cannabis plants to be used in ads for cannabis companies.
His “Milky Way from the Lowest Place on Earth” series photographed at the Dead Sea is included in a National Geographic exhibition at the Israel National Aquarium in Jerusalem.
“I actually studied law and used to work in my brother’s law office. But I love nature, so I went back to art,” Levi says.
Levi’s 2025 itinerary includes astrophotography trips to California, Nevada and Utah; Iceland (in March, April and September); New Zealand; Chile; Canary Islands; and the Dolomites.
If you can’t join one of his how-to tours this time around, Levi says the next solar maximum is expected to peak in the year 2035.
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