Aurora chasers who braved cold nights in September and October in search of the northern lights will have new opportunities to capture the celestial phenomena in the coming days.
A geomagnetic storm is forecast to occur over much of Canada on Nov. 28 and Nov. 29, according to U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), greatly increasing the possibility of a spectacle of lights in the sky. The storm is classified as G1-G2, a “minor to moderate” disturbance of the Earth’s magnetosphere.
The lights will also appear in the U.S. over some of the northern and upper Midwest states from New York to Idaho, the NOAA announced.
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are caused by massive explosions on the sun called “coronal mass ejections” (CMEs). These eruptions sometimes blast huge amounts of solar material from the sun, according to NOAA, and that matter, called plasma, flows along with solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.
The northern lights are seen near near Cremona, Alberta, Canada. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
The lights we see overhead are the highly-visible, charged particles from CMEs as they are captured by Earth’s magnetic field and funnelled overtop our northern and southern polar regions. Auroras often take on ghostly green hues, but can sometimes glow bright pink, purple, or even blue.
On Nov. 27, pillars of silver light shone in a row over Lacombe, Alberta, and were photographed by Dar Tanner, who posted his images on Alberta Aurora Chasers group on Facebook. He noted a -30 degree C windchill as he snapped photos from Blackfalds.
Days earlier, on Nov. 24, lights were visible from some parts of Calgary in the evening, despite light pollution from city lights.
Throughout autumn, aurora chases tripped their way through wintry fields in the dark of night to catch sight of the brilliant lights. As of Oct. 15, the sun reached its solar maximum period. Aurora chaser Lisa Jones observed dancing ribbons in the sky near Red Earth Creek last month, a result of the storms reaching their pinnacle.
Jones posted on her Instagram that she “did not come home unscathed, sustaining a few pretty large gashes to my leg,” but it was worth it.
“I still have tons of photos from this magical night to sift through,” she wrote, “so like it or not, there’s more to come!”
Michael Wing
Editor and Writer
Michael Wing is a writer and editor based in Calgary, Canada, where he was born and educated in the arts. He writes mainly on culture, human interest, and trending news.
