Guest Author: Neil Zeller
Give Yourself the Grace to Chase
Give yourself, at minimum, grace. And give others that grace, too.
You're new to chasing the Northern Lights. You see these incredible photos online, and you go out and look for yourself. You look and see nothing. At least nothing to write home about. Maybe a grey cloud-looking thing.
It's not you, it's me. It’s my incredible photos.
I've been at this for a very long time.
Here's what I know.
The sacrifice is real. The cold, the sleep deprivation, the expense, missing family time, the overlooked commitments, the fear (of the things that go bump in the night), the inevitable comparison to everyone else’s photos, and quite possibly the jealousy that comes with that. The sacrifice is real.
If you are new, you'll watch a popular Facebook group, or the news, and head out because you saw the aurora images that people are posting or a report of an imminent CME. You come home sad because it wasn't any of that to you.
What I know is: the potential of what might be, to be seen by you/me/them, is worth the sacrifice.
I always chuckle a bit when we have one of those nights, where every person who simply looks up, sees an incredible display of aurora. Even people who are chasing for the very first time. I chuckle because those first timer people are kind of ruined. They may never see the aurora like that again, even if they really dedicate themselves to the pursuit.
I am equally heartened when I see a chaser who has toiled for years finally get to see the lights as they potentially can be. At their most spectacular. It's almost a religious moment for them. There are almost always tears of joy in that case. A drastic turn from staunch skeptic to devout believer. It only takes one show.
But wow, did they work hard to get there.
How do we respond to new chasers when asked: "Where can I see the lights tonight?" The answers they get run the gamut from the question being automatically rejected by the Facebook group algorithms, to mean people responses, to really earnest answers from the most caring of aurora chase helpers and mentors.
Often, the innocent question is mocked. Usually by the staunch skeptic who has toiled without that big payoff. The one who, over and over again, has their efforts thwarted by clouds, timing, circumstance, and sheer bad luck, and is jaded.
The single biggest obstacle in this chase is that the timing is terribly inconvenient.
Stupid aurora only comes out at night.
My son laughs when I tell him at 1:00pm that I just got a G3 aurora alert on my phone. He responds by looking out the window with a simple comment:
"It’s day."
We humans like to sleep, we have jobs, we have appointments tomorrow, we like to sleep.
I travel for the aurora. I have a 100% successful method for ensuring I see the absolute best aurora that a night will produce.
I stay awake all night.
For almost every single one of you, that is a no. That is preposterous. Crazy. Impossible.
I grew up in Saskatchewan, and we had a 24-hour telethon that was, for many, a highlight of television entertainment each year (Hi, Alvin Law!!). As a Gen X kid, I never really had a bedtime anyway, but on this night, we were expected to stay up, for funsies. Heck, your dad was probably part of a cross-country ski fundraiser relay team that skied the highway ditches from Melfort to Saskatoon and ended up on stage presenting a $1,346.27 cheque at 4:14am, so you didn't want to miss that.
But you did miss that. Because at night, your body wants to sleep, and so it did. You wake up to a cheering stage and a big signboard tally of over a million dollars!! Ring those phones! And then you go back to sleep.
Now, back to the potential.
The lights rarely are best from sundown to midnight. So that eliminates a bunch of people. Midnight is kind of a hard stop for lots of folks. But then they wake up the next morning, generally rested, and see many photos from overnight that are spectacular. And then they deepen their skepticism.
So go out and stay out. That's it. You'll see the absolute best the night has to offer that way.
Ugh. That sounds very unpleasant. And it is. Dog forbid the lights are forecast for two or three nights in a row. I have "efforted" aurora storms that last days, and at the end, I have a true jet lag, or aurora lag. It flips your clock, and it takes significant effort to get back to daytime health.
I do a pep talk with my groups when we travel to the North, or on night sky trips locally, that basically states: ‘Suck it up, buttercup, be tired tomorrow, this is why you are here’. When we travel to the North, I secretly wish for a blizzard the first night because, like most of you, we tend not to sleep well before a vacation. We are up packing, getting everything done at work, dealing with last-minute things, so you show up the first day very sleep deprived. Not a good thing if the sky is clear that first night. That first night should be snowy, and I'll make sure to move breakfast the next morning to 11:00 am so you can sleep in, too. Let's start charging those batteries!
It's much easier to convince yourself to stay up when you have traveled and paid to go see the lights. But still not easy. Bedtime is bedtime. It's a very hard habit to fool.
Ok, enough of that. You get it. Sleep is really compelling.
The next part is about the camera.
Here's how it is for me. I have been photographing the lights for almost 15 years. It’s like this: I see the lights in my head the way the camera is going to see them. My brain chemistry has been forever altered to understand what’s going to reveal itself via long-exposure photograph potential. Sounds a bit insane, doesn't it? It's not something I tried to do. It just happened.
Does this make you feel better when you go out and maybe see a grey cloud-looking thing in the sky, and I, sitting beside you, am saying, "Whoa! Look at that pillar going up on the right side, it's got a pink top!" And you still only see the grey cloud-looking thing.
Then I show you the back of my camera.
Here's the deal. In this moment, I’m not trying to make you feel bad for not seeing the lights. I truly want you to see them like I do, as potential.
The camera is not lying. It's doing its job. Letting us use a specific tool to see in the dark.
Do you complain about your car's headlights? Do you ask others, "Is the highway ahead of you visible by eye, or by headlights?"
Don't get mad at me for that one. It's not baiting you; it's trying to get you to drop the skepticism and start imagining what is possible.
I want to stop for a second and clarify something.
All of this talk is for an aurora that is hard to see by eye, the kind that compels the question from skeptics: "Is that by eye, or is it by camera?" All of this is rendered null and void once you've seen a truly good aurora by eye. Once you stand under the lights and see the dance, the colour, the speed, the flow, the pillars, the everything... You get it, and none of this stuff matters anymore. You are then, forever, irreversibly… changed.
Ok, where was I?
Oh yeah. The camera.
The single biggest change to the popularity and lore of the northern lights (and southern lights for that matter) is simply the camera. The strength of sensors, the quality of lenses, and the mass availability of consumer-grade and consumer-priced gear have encouraged a generation of aurora chaser/photographers.
I know for a fact that when an aurora storm is predicted, alcohol sales go down dramatically that evening. The easiest way to opt out of an aurora storm night, especially on consecutive nights, is to quickly down three glasses of wine. Then you can't go out. Phew. AND usage of sick days at work goes way up the next day. I have an aurora fever, wink wink.
Phone cameras are good now, too, but they are more of a gateway device, a ramp to a good camera and lens.
These cameras are a game changer. My usual advice for newcomers to the hobby is to invest in a decent camera and lens and learn how to use it. There are a zillion articles online on how to set up your camera to capture the aurora. It takes a person willing to put the work in. At this point, of being offered good advice, sometimes the skeptic simply doubles down on the skepticism and then doubles down again on the discourse over what we're really seeing. You are lying about what's there if I can't see it. As they avoid the deer on the highway that their headlights allowed them to see.
My brain looks at the dark night sky and sees what the camera will prove. It's not, not there. It just needs exposing. See what I did there, camera nerds?
I then take the picture. Maybe open the shutter for 30 seconds. That is a crazy amount of time to allow light to reach the sensor. The light builds and builds until it shows us what's there. It's not making anything up; it’s just collecting light.
Try this: Turn on your stove burner. As low as it can go. It doesn't turn red; it simply looks like it always does. Quickly tap your finger on the element. Nothing. You didn't even feel the heat. Hold your finger on the element for half a second. Maybe you felt a bit of warmth. Nothing really warm, though. Hold your finger on the element for five seconds. Oh, that got warm! Now try to hold for 30 seconds. It probably got to the point where you couldn't hold your finger there anymore.
That's how long exposures work. They build up "light heat" on the sensor. A night sky image of aurora taken for half a second is cold, dark. Nothing on camera, black. Kind of what your eye is/isn't seeing. The image at 30 seconds may be too bright, too "hot."
The heat is there; the light is there. You just must put your finger on it for the exact right amount of time to see it for what it is. Your eye sees the light for that quick tap of the burner and can’t ‘hold’ there for longer to see more.
What is that exact right amount of time? Dunno. Let’s get out there and see. Every aurora show is different. I’ve captured the aurora at 30-second shutter speed, and I’ve also shot the brightest, fastest display at 1/60 of a second. But. Every aurora night photo album, at the very front of the folder, has about 10 really bad, poorly exposed, poorly composed, blurry aurora images. Test shots, we call them.
What I do know is that you'll learn, if you are willing to invest the time, skepticism-free, in the craft. Open yourself up to the incredible world of wide night sky photography, and you'll finally know what all the hype is about. Your brain, instead of telling you nothing is there, will tell you what's possible, and you can go get it.
In the meantime, give others that grace we talked about. The ones who have "seen the light" (see what I did there, too?) aren't aurora religion zealots; they are just excited to share what they now understand. Don't steal their excitement. I still get excited. After 15 years and hundreds of thousands of aurora photos, I still get excited. Occasionally, someone mocks my excitement. I ignore them completely. This is worth getting excited about.
But most importantly, give yourself that grace. If you went out for your very first time and saw one of those top five aurora nights by eye, don't be discouraged by the dim lights that seem forever present after that. Dive into the craft of seeing more of what's possible, even when your eyes need the help.
If you are like most people, and chase and chase and chase, do it in a way that improves your technical skill and knowledge base, and encourages others to do the same. With the grace to allow yourself to fail. To sleep through a big one, to shoot an entire night out of focus, to be too afraid of the night to get out of your car. It happens. But the sun keeps giving us this incredible potential.
And we are living in an age where the tools are within easy reach to capture this most incredible sight.
Give yourself the grace to chase.
