What we all waited for ...

What we were waiting for at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.

 It is curious that the renown Canadian artist Lawren Harris while searching for spiritual light in the artic did not concentrate on painting the Aurora Borealis. Perhaps he needed exposure to the enthusiasm of someone with a doctorate in solar physics, like our  instructor Danielle. Perhaps he required her deft descriptions of the Sun’s eleven-year cycle over which time the numbers of sunspots grow and each spot casts gargantuan loops of flowing electrified gas into our star’s atmosphere; loops that arc for days or even months.  Perhaps Harris would be intrigued that during this cycle magnetic field lines twist tighter and tighter across the sun’s surface. Perhaps he didn’t grasp that the blistering outer atmosphere of our star, its so-called Corona, expands into space, not spherically like a shell, but instead blooms like a flower pushing out petals.  Would Harris find the aurora more sublime if he knew the sun blows magnetic fields ensnared in wind towards the Earth? And that when the solar magnetic field lines kiss the Earth’s own magnetic-field shield that the lines of both break — and instantly snap back together.  Snap, like the sudden sharp, shock of static electricity sparks created when he kissed his cat. The multitudes of new-born charged particles, forced by this passion lower into Earth’s atmosphere than usual, do-si-do with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, releasing ribbons of green, blue, and red light.  Yes, isn't it curious that these colours don't glow across the sky in Harris’s far north landscapes? 

I wish I had portraits of the glowing, wide-eyed, mouth-open faces of the adults attending Danielle’s lectures on the Northern Lights at the Winter Skies Learning Vacation. She certainly lit up their imaginations with her tour of the physical processes leading to curtains of colour swaying and pulsing across the dome of the sky.  And at first we worried we would only see the aurora in our imaginations. 

The winter skies were cloudy the first few days; the clouds glowed green so we knew the Sun and Earth were canoodling above them.  Danielle woke up every hour to look at her smart phone -- she would check the outdoor cameras pointed at the sky for the coloured ribbons. She'd scroll through the apps that monitored space weather for solar flares (called Coronal Mass Ejections) and tracked positions of holes in the Sun’s Corona out of which blow the solar wind.  All night her husband Dustin, jack-of-all-trades and master  photographer, kept one ear glued to his phone, waiting for her ping -- this would signal that he should check the sky from the observation dome and from the balcony observing deck jutting from the building’s second floor. If there were aurora, the two of them would knock on everyone’s bedroom door, no matter the hour. No one would miss the light show. That was the plan at least. 

An unnecessary one since the sky finally cleared the second last night at 9:30 PM, well before a night owl's bedtime. The star-speckled heavens displayed the kind of aurora I had seen on the Bruce Trail in Ontario and a quite few times in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba; the discrete, curtain-like kind of Northern Lights. Did the aurora make a sound? I heard something. It turned out to be the echo of the observing deck door clanging open and closed.   The display was special and lovely even without any bangs and whistles. Still the group craved an experience of all the kinds of aurora that Danielle had described.  We wanted more.

Second last night -- finally the clouds cleared.

But we were running out of time. Only one more night before we all flew out.  A number of our group had their noses glued to the space-  and Earth- weather apps. They pinned down a time that the sky might clear and the wind blasting through a coronal hole might arrive.  They anticipated a fifteen minute opening in the clouds about a quarter of an hour before midnight. 

Everyone turned out the lights in their bedrooms. Enthusiastic, hours before that predicted time, we bundled into snow pants, hefty boots and mitts, baklavas and toques, and Canada Goose coats. I lugged out my iPhone on a tripod.  We always went out to the parking area and under the observing deck in groups, no one ever alone — can’t trust those rogue polar bears who should be in a den or on the Bay.  It seemed this rule in practice really was meant to ensure there was someone to pick you up when you fell in the dark into deep snow.  

The sky was rather light and the contrast with the stars was much lower than I anticipated.  The cold was cliche — in other words, biting.  But the sky again showed us kindness and displayed aurora similar to the show of previous evening -- same time, same place. I remember a lull in the viewing quality that sent us inside to wait as the clock ticked towards midnight. Some folk lounged in the foyer chairs and couches, stretched out like hibernating creatures.  Others socially drank a warm beverage in the canteen while whispering and keeping look-out through the slanted windows in hope.  Some, sated, headed to bed. It was growing late and we needed to rise early in the morning. The quarter hour to midnight was more than an hour away. Not a glimmer.  All but Dustin were lackadaisical. But he diligently kept his eye towards the window — was that a green colour he saw reflected in the glass? 

The software for making this gif has posterised the photos, rather like Lauren Harris's style of abstraction -- eh? 

So we trundled out again to be greeted by the gentle beginnings of a show like the previous ones. I settled into freezing my fingers every time I wanted to tap my phone screen for a ‘long’ exposure. And then suddenly an astonishing experience happened.   Yes the aurora was accompanied by sounds —the exhilarated voices of Aurora hunters. 

Not captured by these 2-D photos and video, the Northern Lights  travel unconstrained across a 3-D hemisphere above the Earthling viewers — one does not know in which quadrant the light and colour will be strongest next. To follow its wild trajectories, I hoisted my tripod out of the snow and continually swung it from here to there in an attempt to aim my camera at the shifting pinnacle of the cosmic fireworks. Meanwhile the aurora incorporated the 4th dimension -- time;  it ignored our regular tick-tocking and instead pulsed and flowed and danced to its own quasi-periodic rhythm.   Green and red screamed visually as electrons flowing in from space interacted with oxygen at lower and higher altitudes. Nitrogen created a blue glow.  And black? That happened when the electrons streamed backwards, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and returning to outer space. 

And then, when the predicted fifteen minutes were up, the Spirits of the Ancestors dissipated, as if on cue.