You may be thinking, did I go on a trip? Nope. Well not in the sense of going outside the province. This fall I was introduced to chasing the elusive Northern Lights (aka Aurora Borealis or Aurora). It's not common yet not uncommon to see the lights this far south. One has to be on the lookout for them, follow some smart forecasters and get out of the city lights. Occasionally they are seen in the city but more often than not you have to get as far away from light pollution as possible.
Aurora is also something you have to be patient for. Lying in wait. You find your foreground hopefully before the sky explodes in colour. But sometimes you pull off on the side of the highway because you didn't quite make it
While waiting you get a chance to admire the stars. Listen to the complete silence of no other humans and be still. Or read a book. Or eat chips. Really it all depends on the chase. And it is a chase because you want to be set up in a good location and you want the lights to flare up in all their glory filling the night sky.
It's a different type of chasing than storm chasing. Space weather is even more tricky to forecast than Earth weather so days when it is forecast to storm can have the solar winds not co-operate and you might not even get a show or a very small one. There also days when the forecast is not favourable for an aurora show and you get rewarded with rippling lights going across the sky.
All of these images were taken in Southern Saskatchewan in an approximate 200 km radius from Regina. The exception is this image aproximately an hour north of Prince Albert.
