Out of the Office: Aurora’s performance was worth the wait

If I were to tally up the hours I’ve spent trying to find the aurora borealis, they would likely add up to weeks.

Searching for them is like trying to bake cookies with a pantry some invisible entity stocks at random. The recipe calls for just three ingredients: Geomagnetic activity powerful enough for the human eye (or my camera’s image sensor) to detect, a clear sky and a time of year where the sun really, truly sets and it gets really, truly dark outside. Sounds easy enough, right?

Anywhere else it would be. But I live in a rainforest, and it’s rare to have a clear sky in stock. During the summers, the sky is a deep, velvety blue on cloudless nights — while it’s one of my favorite colors, it’s not conducive to spotting Lady A. The final ingredient in this seemingly simple recipe is a moderate KP index, which is available far more often than the other two, but invisible without them.

Every night, I poke my head into the pantry to see what’s there. I clamber on to my roof when there’s a break in the clouds; I check my aurora forecasting app religiously. Something has been missing every day for the past two weeks.

But yesterday, the sky was clear. I checked the forecast all day and looked forward to sunset as the KP index climbed and kept climbing. Last night, when I broke my lease agreement for the dozenth time by crawling up to the roof of my apartment complex, I realized the pantry was finally fully stocked.

I gathered my camera supplies and several friends, and we drove north to Mendenhall Lake. I set my camera on its tripod and adjusted the settings, taking dozens of test shots. It felt like following a recipe without knowing any of the measurements until the faint green blobs in the sky lit up and turned to ribbons.

There are many ways to write about what happened next. I could write scientifically and say the show was so spectacular because a series of explosions on the sun’s surface caused charged particles to hit the Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in unusually bright and colorful displays of greens and reds. I could write metaphorically and say that for once, I followed the recipe perfectly and got a taste of the most incredible cookies I’ve had so far. But in those moments, I wasn’t thinking about science, or cookies, or even about how cold my toes were getting.

As I stood under the stars and watched Lady A dance and throw colors across the night’s black canvas, I thought about how I was just one small, insignificant part of the landscape, as relevant as one of the rocks by the lakeshore or the tree I was standing near. I thought about how it’s natural for protons and electrons to enter the earth’s magnetic field just like it’s natural for humpback whales to bubblenet feed. It’s also natural for bears to eat salmon and killer whales to breach and glaciers to calve.

But witnessing these things doesn’t feel natural. It feels like a miracle every single time.

Reach reporter Chloe Anderson at chloe.anderson@peninsulaclarion.com.