What are the best cameras for photographing lightning and the aurora borealis?

a camera that can do both would be great. ive acually managed to capture lightning w/ my digital camera but it took me forever and the night vision sucks. ive also tried it on fireworks (because it has a fireworks setting) but that just resulted in a blur. my camera is a Samsung Digimax L60 with 6.0 megapixels if that helps. i really want to capture the night lights!!!! please help!

multi purpose cameras please

For lighting events or special stuff like that you better off going with a film camera. I don't know how familiar you are with photography. Digital cameras have a low lattitude for under and over exposure. Film gives you up to 2 maybe 3 f/stops in error and you can still get great pictures.

For this stuff, you will probably need an 35MM SLR camera so you can control the settings.

You will need a camera that you can adjust the shutter to stay open for up to 30 seconds or has the "B" (bulb) setting. You may have to play a little with the f/stops to get the best colour saturation

Then you just place the camera on a tripod and start exposing. BTW due to the nature of the aurora, the photos of it will not be sharp. That is why in most photos of that phenomenon usually include the silhouette of a tree or building that is sharp so it give a feeling of sharpness to the whole image.

my suggestion
go to yahoo shopping
digital cameras
digital camera GUIDE
be sure to check titles on the left side
the guide should answer your questions

I've been very happy with the Fujifilm Finepix F10. It has very good low light performance. It can take good pictures of lightning, but I haven't had the chance to take a picture of the aurora borealis. It goes up to 1600 ISO and 15 seconds. For good quality pictures, you definitely should consider an SLR. For a good dynamic range, I'd suggest one of those Fujifilm cameras that has two different size pixels.

If you arent wanting to shoot film (your best option) you need to go with a digital slr (to avoid noise which is terrible on point and shoots, noise is hard to explain but you dont want it) , probably nikon or canon just because they have the best options (camera and lenses), get maybe a nikon d50 on ebay, or a nikon d80, and get a wide angle lens (the kit lens 18-55 would work) but the tokina 12-24mm would work great. then set the shutterspeed for at least 5 seconds and a low iso, and just mess with different shutter speeds to get what you want. hope this helps