Awestruck in the Arctic: an Aurora Borealis Gallery

This is part 3 of the story. If you missed the previous parts, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Aurora of the Ancients

From the first human who tipped their head back to watch the fierce and brilliant otherworldly lights, there have been myths to explain the phenomenon of the aurora borealis. The stories of the aurora are wide and varied, but each suggests something greater than ourselves, greater than humanity. And I felt that, head tipped back, breath misting the air. I felt like I could almost touch them, like I was so close to something more…

And I wanted it to be something more.

So I have my own aurora myth, something that popped into my head while I watched something breathtaking and magical and far greater than myself. But first, the myths of the ancients.

Aurora Borealis means “dawn of the north” from the Roman Goddess of the Dawn, Aurora, and the Greek God of the North, Boreas.

The Romans said the lights trailed from Aurora’s chariot as she rode across the late night sky.

The Vikings claimed the lights were the bifrost bridge (yes, that bifrost bridge from the Thor movies) that was used by fallen warriors to travel to Valhalla.

Down south, where the lights are called aurora australis, or “dawn of the south,” the Maori of New Zealand believed the lights were reflections of the torches and cooking fires of their ancestors who sailed south.

The Finns believe the lights are caused by a magical fox who bounds across the wintery expanse. His tail swishes through the snow, throwing luminous swirls of ice and snow into the sky to create the aurora. The Swedes, in turn, believed they were a school of herring, and that spotting them was an indicator that the fishing was good.

Chinese stories tell of celestial dragons winding through the sky.

The Inuit in Alaska believe the lights are the spirits of animals such as seals, salmon, caribou, and beluga whales, while the Inuit of Canada believe the lights are the souls of the dead. In some stories, the dead are dancing with torches, in others they are playing soccer (a traditional game of the Inuit). They run through the sky chasing a walrus head, which they use as a ball.

Other stories say caribou herds come down from the sky upon the northern lights. Thus, when the northern lights are in the sky, caribou are nearby.

The truth that we are lucky (or unlucky) enough to know today is far less fanciful, though still quite impressive. Yet, I prefer the myths. I prefer to imagine the spirits of animals, the tail of a sneaky, fanciful fox, and the gates to another world. You can’t help but see the roots of these stories, the almost tangible truth as you lay out upon the snow and wonder at the marvels of this world. Wonder if, perhaps, there isn’t a little bit of magic involved after all.

Night 1

The first night I saw the aurora, I started out with a fluttery feeling in my chest. Not from excitement–from dread (read more here). The moon was so bright, sucking the color from the aurora just as it lit the earth in a facsimile of the sun. (It was so bright that I squinted when I looked at the moon.)

And, at first the lights were merely a tiny, pale smudge across the sky that didn’t DO anything. It was cool, in the way that anything that’s unusual in the sky is cool: a satellite, a shooting star, even a really bright planet. But it wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. It didn’t make me gasp or drop my mouth open in astonishment. It didn’t shock me the way I wanted to be shocked.

But I needn’t have feared. The aurora is ever-changing, and within fifteen minutes, it became something entirely different and my heart was in my throat for many other reasons: excitement, anticipation, awe.

The photos are beautiful, the curtains stretch across the sky and the camera vividly captures the colors despite the ridiculously bright moon. But the real magic of the aurora–what made our mouths drop open and our eyes bug out and our souls sing–is the way it moves. Definitely hit play on the video below. It’s so breathtaking you’ll barely even notice the bumbling giant in the bottom right corner (thanks Mason!).

The Sun Lights the Way (even at night)

If you passed kindergarten, you probably also know that the sun’s light reflects off the surface of the moon. This is what makes the moon glow its silvery light during the darkness of the night.

The aurora is also due to the sun. Solar flares, when the sun erupts with a burst of radiation, send electrically charged particles (electrons and protons) into the void of space. Some of those particles reach earth. This vast stream is called solar wind (but that’s not important to remember).

Most of these electrically charged particles are actually deflected by the earth’s magnetic field, but the magnetic field is weaker at either pole and some particles enter our atmosphere. There, they collide with gas particles such as oxygen and nitrogen. The molecular battle produces light–the magnificent rippling light waves that are the aurora.

Distance and chemical make-up determine the color of the lights. The most common is yellow-green, which is produced by oxygen particles about 60 miles above the earth. Atmospheric nitrogen equals blue and purple-red colors, while vivid red comes from oxygen closer to 200 miles above the earth!

Night 2

It was too cloudy. This doesn’t happen too often, though I was worried it would. The weather forecast for nights 2-6 was all clouds, but only one night, this night, was actually cloudy. The rest of the time, the skies cleared like the sea for Moses, and the aurora broke through. In fact, one night, the clouds were swept to the east like a stack of lint and blocked the brilliant moon so we could see the aurora even better.

Night 5-6

I’m skipping ahead because it’s good practice to save the best for last. Nights 5 and 6, we were back in Yellowknife rather than at Yellow Dog Lodge.

You can see the aurora from within the city of Yellowknife. But, unless it’s brilliant, you can’t see it very well. It looks kind of like a trail of airplane exhaust. My dad and I walked through a few neighborhoods and scrambled up a snowy hill to get away from the lights, but it wasn’t quite as magical as in the vast emptiness around Yellow Dog Lodge.

In fact, Yellowknife is a shockingly well lit town for the best place in the world to see the aurora. They have streetlights everywhere because, in the dark depths of winter when there is merely a few hours of sunlight, they have to light the streets so kids can catch the bus and people can scrape the ice from their cars. But, it is SO BRIGHT for a city of only 20,000. In fact, multiple buildings in town light themselves up in a facsimile of the aurora. It’s a charming thought–but it stops people from being able to see the real aurora!

Night 3

The aurora started earlier tonight, kicking off with a few ribbons out of the east. We didn’t hang around on the lake–we beelined for the inukshuk hill and the sky responded in kind.

Instead of dancing above our heads, as the aurora had done on the first night, the lights danced on the horizon. We crowded onto the single bench atop the hill and were glad not to be basking in the heat-sucking snow. The aurora pulsed in the distance. The two strands moved in opposite directions, building and squiggling and moving so cooperatively like the flow of traffic on a two lane highway.

While the aurora’s intricate dance is breathtaking from any angle, we mourned that the lights weren’t filling the whole sky above us. That was the most breathtaking sight from night one.

And then, suddenly, there it was, streaming above us.

A strand appeared out of nowhere–thin air–and was dancing over our heads in shades of pale-green, vivid green, and hints of low atmosphere red. This moment, captured by the looped time-lapse video below, was one of the moments when I connected most powerfully to the aurora–to the myth and the otherworldliness.

It felt, for the briefest of moments, as this beautiful aurora snapped and spun above my head, that I was peering into another world. That this brilliant curling light was the hem of a goddess’s dress as she stepped over me.

There–and then gone, like a lost balloon swept away on an ocean breeze. Like any longer glimpse of that goddess, of that world, would have sucked me into it. So I’m all right with standing on the edge of this phenomenon.

This is when I knew this would not be my last trip to delight in the northern lights. This is a life-long obsession, I’m afraid. And this is the moment it truly began.

Yay for Yellowknife

I do not plan my vacations lightly. If my goal is to see the northern lights, then I am going to see the northern lights. I won’t waste my time staying in in a big city and heading out on a northern lights tour one night. What happens if it’s cloudy? Or they just don’t happen that night.

Nope. Not me. I researched. I picked my location: Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. And then I picked my accommodations: a remote lodge in the middle of nowhere with zero light pollution. (Of course, the original lodge fell through, but the back-up we ended up using was amazing!)

I picked the Northwest Territories because I read that if you stay in Yellowknife for three nights, you have a 95% chance of seeing the northern lights. This is because the magnetic poles of our planet are where the electron’s and protons from the sun enter the atmosphere. But it’s not exactly at the poles. In fact, it is much more of an oval, called the aural oval. This means the actual pole hardly ever sees the northern lights. And that Yellowknife, directly beneath this oval, sees them almost every night until there is no night (May through mid-August).

In the weeks leading up to our voyage, I found a website that posted a nightly aurora photo log. The photos are taken by Aurora Village, which is a company that offers many wintertime activities, including a nice (heated) aurora viewing spot about 20 minutes from Yellowknife. From February to April, there were less than 10 days where they didn’t see a beautiful aurora. You can check out the website here for the 2022-2023 season.

Night 4

On the morning before our last night at Yellow Dog Lodge, my dad said, “tonight’s going to be the best aurora yet.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the aurora forecast was low.

The Kp index is a global aurora indicator. It measures geothermal activity in the atmosphere. In other words, it’s a prediction of how good the aurora is going to be on a scale of 0 to 9. Low numbers indicate a dimmer and more subdued aurora, while the higher the number, the more active and vivid the aurora is.

For our entire trip, the Kp forecast was 2. Except for tonight, our last night. It was 1.

That only goes to show that nature bucks rules, like a Kunkel. It was the best night we had. The aurora was everywhere, streaming out of the west with deep curtains, faint purples, and near constant motion. From bluish-green strands, to a deep Disney-villian shade of ominous green, to a brief glimpse of high altitude red, the aurora put on quite a show our last night.