A look at how dimming access to dark skies influences the interactions between the aurora borealis and the people underneath them.
Originally published on January 1, 2025.
For most of human civilization, on a cloudless night, our dark skies were consistently speckled with stars. While we had light in our ancient cities, it was nowhere near as visually polluting to our skies as they are today. Lightbulbs clicked on by the end of the 19th century. Although, our skies have always been capable of explosions of colour. That is, if you’ve got the right conditions and are closer in latitude to either the North or South Pole. In English, we call these the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and southern lights, or aurora australis. As cities and their light pollution sprawl, so too does the interest in appreciating and preserving the beauty of our night skies.
Who are the aurora borealis?
George Littlechild is a Cree artist and a sixties scoop survivor. As a child raised in Edmonton, he remembers being blown away by the aurora borealis, in awe of the power of their colour. “So,” he says, “I didn’t understand the breadth of the teachings at that time, but I know a lot more now.” Thanks to the teachings later in his life from his family on the Ermineskin Cree Nation reserve, the artist knows, “You’re not to whistle or point because those are the ancestral spirits and not to be disturbed.”
The aurora holds special importance for many Indigenous peoples who have lived with the lights since time immemorial. Though it’s important to recognize how each culture and their teachings are unique, some teachings explain that the vivid, colorful displays are ancestors themselves, or messages from the ancestors, to be respected.
For example, the Plains Cree people have multiple terms in nêhiyawêwin (the Cree language) for the aurora borealis. As shown in the native-land website’s map, the treaty defined region of Treaty Six is within northern latitudes and encompasses part of the Plains Cree people’s historic territories. Per the Plains Cree Dictionary website, some of the terms for the aurora include wâwâhtêwa meaning “those that go in circles” or, cîpayak kâ-nîmihitotwâw meaning “the ghosts dancing in the skies”.
What are the auroras as defined by western science?
Our planet’s magnetic field is constantly directing the flow of traffic of energized space particles around Earth, like water over a pebble. We wouldn’t have aurora without this magnetic field.
Right now, plasma, a gas made up of electrically charged particles, is flowing from the sun across our solar system. This is called solar wind. It’s just a fact of life in our galaxy that sometimes, the sun’s plasma can mess with the sun’s magnetic field, exert energy, and makes our sun spit up, (that’s our definition of a coronal mass ejection, take it or leave it.) The solar wind/plasma/coronal mass ejection travels like a bullet train, going over one million miles per hour. Once this hits Earth’s magnetic field, the aurora magic can happen. Sometimes the plasma flows around the Earth, and can re-connect to Earth’s magnetic field on the side opposite of the sun called the magnetotail. This reconnection releases energy near Earth called a magnetic substorm, which helps energize particles that will be sent down the line of our magnetic field to our Poles. Finally, particles hit our atmosphere, and pass off some of their excitement to the valence electron buddies of the neutral atoms in the atmosphere, like oxygen and nitrogen. At last, the particles chillax, as they let go of the light particles (photons) and go back to their normal, non-energized state. These interactions between space and atmosphere particles result in the colourful aurora we know and love.
“You’re not to whistle or point because those are the ancestral spirits and not to be disturbed.”
George Littlechild, a Cree artist and sixties scoop survivor.
The Kp Index, which ranges from zero to nine, describes the disturbance of the Earth’s magnetic field caused by solar wind. The higher a disturbance, the more likely it is to have Aurora showing farther from the Poles. For instance, a showing visible only north of Iceland would be Kp 0, while a showing around 40 degree latitude would be a Kp of 9. The number on the index all depends on how violent the interaction between the magnetic field and the solar winds are.
Chasing the aurora
For nature photographer Shane Turgeon, growing up in rural Saskatchewan meant the aurora was just a part of his environment, yet their frequent presence never took away from his childhood awe. He finds comfort in his childhood memory of a cold window against his forehead. He was on a drive home in winter as he watched the aurora dance overhead and illuminate the empty, snow covered fields below. Now, Turgeon likes to lead nature photography walks for better mental health. His goal is to help others reconnect with their childlike curiosity in those moments in nature where you just stop to stare and admire. Turgeon says, “I think that’s the essence of our humanity. And I think that that’s the sort of stuff that helps us through really dark times, too.”
Just 50 km outside of Edmonton sits the 300 sq. kmr Beaver Hills Dark Sky Preserve, made up of Elk Island National Park and the Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area. At Elk Island National Park, Turgeon took his first picture of the aurora by accident as he snapped pictures of the stars. He got a new camera in Dec.,2015, and after his first time out with it on the Mother’s Day aurora show in May of 2016, he was hooked. Some of his aurora photos were two to three years long works in progress, a waiting game for the right conditions and location. When Turgeon first joined the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group, it had around 10,000 members. Now, there’s over 280,000 members.
Ahmed Rabie, a recent Canadian citizen, had been dreaming about seeing the northern lights since before he came to Canada. A few years prior to moving to Toronto in 2016, Rabie had his first introduction to the aurora borealis on a screen, through a movie. He moved up in latitude, to Edmonton, in 2019 and waited years until his first sighting of the aurora.
It was a September evening in 2021. Rabie wasn’t too far from his house when he saw the aurora for the first time. He says, “They’re definitely one of the most beautiful moments, most heartwarming moments I’ve ever witnessed in my life.” The lights were mainly green. But, some pink and white shades popped in. Rabie says, “For a brief moment, for two minutes, it was like an explosion of lights.” He joined the Facebook group Aurora Chasers Edmonton over a year ago, which hosts 65K members at the time of writing. The largest portion of his Aurora tracking routine starts with the Aurora app, which forecasts Kp and cloud coverage. “It’s a patience game,” he says.
Limited editions: Dark skies.
After a Kp 8-9 aurora show in May of 2024, per Google Trends, the interest in searches for the term aurora spiked completely to 100 out of 100, both in Canada and worldwide.
Aurora sightings mainly rely on the sun’s activities and cloud cover. But, light pollution drives up the urban desire to admire and/or photograph the beauty of our night sky, including the aurora.
To do so, many people in urban cities get in a car and drive like Littlechild, who loves watching the stars at night. “I used to be able to see the stars. Now I really have to go to the country to see them. And that’s not very fun,” he says.
Turgeon highly encourages aurora chasers not to go to Elk Island, which on a night with high Kp, can have traffic lining down the entrance and onto the highway. “You can go to the next range road over and still have the same sky,” he says.
Based on the Bortle scale of light pollution, which measures skies based on how clearly you can see the Milky Way from 1 to 9, most modern cities, but not all, end up with an 8 or 9 rating. This renders the skies nearly invisible in terms of astronomy. A quick glance at a light pollution map and you’ll notice how Alberta has the most widespread light pollution in all of Canada. Yet, organizations like the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) are making a significant effort to bring our beautifully dark skies back to urban areas.
The Edmonton sect is one of five astronomical centres in the prairie provinces. John Wooley holds two appointed positions at the Edmonton centre as the dark sky preserve coordinator and light pollution abatement chair. He says, “The Edmonton sector kind of does their own thing…We’re helping places that want to become a dark sky preserve.” Potential preserves have a multi-stage process ahead of them to secure darker skies. First, they need to apply to the national office and meet a list of criteria, many centred on proper lighting. Wooley says, “ …You have to go out and measure how bright the sky is [of the site]…lighting in the area has to be (the) proper temperature and colour, and then the closer you get to the middle the more the lighting dissipates.” This process creates a pocket of sky within a city that rivals that of a rural area.
These preserves also need to implement an educational approach, like the project Wooley is currently working on called Métis Crossing. It’s a cultural centre in Smoky Lake, Alta. that offers Indigenous experiences, including sky watching domes and lessons on how the skies guided the ancestors of the Metis peoples. It’s a stark contrast to how John talked about urban centres, as he said, “It’s like we[‘re] kind of becoming detached from nature…”. But with the help of the RASC, places like Métis Crossing, Elk Island, and Jasper have become sanctuaries for astronomy and learning, to see what the Indigenous peoples of our country saw many moons ago.
What’s in store for the future of dark skies and aurora?
Turgeon says, “Light pollution is, I think, one of the worst environmental concerns in Alberta that is not being talked about.” In one of Turgeon’s photos of the aurora from that Mother’s Day show of 2016, the dancing lights made train tracks below glow green. The neon tracks shoot down the center of the image to an orange horizon. He titled the photo, Future Unlimited, which he says, “…is an optimistic title from a pessimistic person. I don’t particularly believe that our future is bright.” Still, the photographer knows that immersing oneself in nature is genuine medicine and relieves stress. “I’m not a religious person,” he says, “but like, nature is church.”
“In the past ten, 11 years, the sky has gotten brighter and brighter and brighter over Edmonton and we’ve literally lost constellations, like you can no longer see anymore,” says Wooley. ” When Turgeon first started his sky photography, he could reach reasonably dark skies south of Mundare, a town 70 km away from Edmonton. Now, he has seen how Edmonton’s skies wash out the constellations even 100 km east and south of the city.
“For a brief moment, for two minutes, it was like an explosion of lights.”
Ahmed Rabie, a recent Canadian citizen and aurora “chaser”.
Wooley says, “as far as the light pollution abatement, we’re not that active there. There’s sort of no one to talk to.” In 2013, Edmonton adopted the Light Efficient Community Policy, which concerns lighting on roadways and in public outdoor spaces, but does not engage much of the general population. Wooley uses a home’s porch lamps blasting light into the sky as an example, where only the “retro” ones have proper shielding. While Edmonton is adding shielding to streetlights, Wooley says, “they’re using the wrong light bulbs.”Bright white LED’s have more blue, cooler light which is actually worse for light pollution. Blue light has shorter wavelengths, and a higher frequency, so it scatters more than the warmer, yellow coloured bulbs Wooley thinks the city ought to be using.
Littlechild says, “when I was younger we didn’t have cellphones, we didn’t take pictures of the northern lights either.” Technology is changing when it comes to how people interact with the aurora. He hopes that once you learn more about a person’s belief system, you know to be more respectful and understanding. As a reminder, when you have the privilege to be below the aurora, Littlechild says, “Just admire and don’t point and don’t whistle, because they’ll come down and haunt you.”
Graphic by Forrester Toews
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