Brighten my Northern Sky

I’ve just returned from two weeks giving talks aboard a ship navigating Alaska’s Inside Passage, with one stop in Canada too. I had a wonderful time giving talks about photography, solar system astronomy, textiles, the Space Race, and a bunch of other things. I was paired with the wonderful naturalist Beth Davidow, who is expert on the Alaska region. She kept us all informed with sightings of humpbacks, information on the remarkable glaciers we passed close to, and much more. I learned a huge amount. If the only thing people came away with from this cruise was how orca are not vicious, mean creatures, we did some good. Over my lifetime I have learned to strip away the myths about spiders, bats, wolves, snakes, and so many other creatures. Orca were already on the list, but now I have more facts to confirm this.

I can’t describe the beauty of Alaska in the fall – but I’ll try. The leaves are changing. There is a dusting of snow on the high mountains, signaling deep winter snowfall will be coming in force in a few weeks. But in the meantime, the towns are eking out the last moments of the summer season, as the final visitors come and go. I took off during the day on smaller boats, on canoes, on kayaks, and on hiking trails, exploring silent rainforests, immense glaciers gleaming blue in the sunlight, and forested shorelines, battling strong tides with my paddle while curious seals popped up to look at me. I ate rosehip and wild huckleberries right off the bushes, and crossed rivers so full of salmon I could barely see the bottom. Bald eagles were everywhere. I listened to the crump noise of glaciers and watched ice, frozen for five hundred years, fall into fjords after its long journey from high mountain passes. I ziplined from a high mountain, racing though a cloud layer at over sixty miles per hour. I saw dozens of sea otters at a time, all around me on the water, floating on their backs, holding on to kelp to anchor themselves. I watched bears ambling across the fronts of glaciers. I first came to these places when I was ten years old, on a long road trip in a Winnebago with my Alaskan uncle, catching salmon, spotting bears, and walking on glaciers in places they have since retreated. This trip was a wonderful reconnection to childhood memories.

But one new thing happened that was on my bucket list. I’ve been close to polar regions around the world before, such as hiking across Icelandic glaciers – but always in summertime. I figured I’d have to make a special trip one of these years to a remote region to see the Northern Lights. The season, the sun’s eleven-year solar cycle, and many other things have to line up. There can be incredible, pulsating light displays in the skies… only to be hidden by clouds all night. As we sailed, Beth and I kept on top of all of our trusted information sources, checking both terrestrial and space weather, hoping it would all line up.

And then, it did.

One night, the clouds were minimal. A powerful geomagnetic storm hit Earth as the sun burped plasma out toward us. Our planet’s magnetic field, the shield that keeps life on Earth safe from all kinds of nasty radiation, fought back. The struggle was quite visible in the sky as the battlefield lit up like a neon tube. Green pulses and waves glinted and arced, while darker purple curtains reached down like fingers trying to snatch our ship from the ocean. It was so bright, the ocean glowed green in reflection. I could see the shimmer though a window from inside a brightly lit room. Outside, on the deck, it was magnificent.

Until a few years ago, I wondered if I would ever see an aurora, or a solar eclipse. Now, just a few months after seeing my second solar eclipse, a short airplane flight from home, work had taken me right under the path of the Northern Lights. I spent the next few days including it in my talks, many of which (photography, and astronomy) already touched upon it.

I look forward to seeing them again.

(All photos taken on a very conventional cell phone on a lit deck. Imagine it in real life, in your own eyes…)