Just read a take that “30 years ago we’d have to wait days for pictures of the Aurora”.
I think this is a case of “mysterious old technology mythical tales”.
First of all, digital cameras or the ability to convert analog video to digital stills existed, widely, since the 1980s. For consumers digital cameras were available in 1994.
For film, the fact is that in the 80s/90s there were 1-hour photo places literally everywhere.
Newspapers had photos of current events since the 19th century.
@thomasfuchs I saw a video documentary of how newspaper photojournalists in the US had special vans that can develop and scan films. They are transmitted through phone lines with something like an analog fax from anywhere with phone lines. I am pretty sure that was during the first half of the 20th century.
@moftasa@thomasfuchs Here’s a newsreel about it from the 1930’s. I like how they use a coil of string to represent converting each scan line to and from an analog signal. https://youtu.be/cLUD_NGE370
@thomasfuchs I've had digital cameras since late 1990s, and have used the 1-hour photo places, but its more the take that these kind of resources and the facility to share hi res photos at low cost are now widely available to everyday folk.
You certainly could have viewed aurora pics within hours in 80s/90s, but would have had to be friends with someone who was really into astronomy and had an SLR camera, tripod and suitable lenses (or waited for a colour magazine to be published)
@thomasfuchs in Britain something like this would have been shown on "Newsround" for kids and "The Sky at Night" for adults, although I used to watch both and never saw an aurora featured on there (I guess there simply weren't that many geomagnetic storms since early 1980s!) Local and national newspapers were black and white here until 1990s (although it would be the sort of thing that appeared in the Sunday colour supplement, so you wouldn't have had to wait that long)
@thomasfuchs I do sometimes get the years mixed up, but it would also make sense why there weren't any aurora pics in mid 90s as sunspot activity was relatively low, it didn't pick up until late 90s (I do a lot of radio monitoring so keep an eye on this as it has some interesting effects such as being able to listen to broadcasters hundreds of km away)
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