The Aurora and the Answer to the Universe

I had a draft written on a completely different topic, however my brain is entirely too muddled to finish it for this week. I was foiled by the aurora borealis, but I’m certainly not complaining. Being able to see the northern lights is a perk of living so far north and one of the things that keeps me here in Minnesota. You care a little less about frozen toes when you’re distracted by a dancing sky.

I follow a couple of aurora hunter groups on Facebook and have a few apps on my phone that alert me when the aurora might be visible. My app alerts were going off repeatedly throughout the day, which usually means that the strongest part of the storm is happening during daylight hours. More times than not it tapers off before the sun goes down. The admin of one of the Facebook groups who knows a decent amount about the science behind the aurora said that this time it looked like the storm was quite powerful and would be continuing throughout the evening. While I’ve seen the aurora before and have taken photos of it, I wanted to try my hand at getting a timelapse of it. So the debate began. Do I head out?

It’s never a question of whether or not I want to see it. I always do. The issue is always about timing. To avoid light pollution requires driving at least an hour away from where I live, and of course it needs to be after dark. The first time I saw it, I was about 4 hours north, close to the border of Canada. It was after 1am, well past my bedtime. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Sometimes, though, I’m just not up for the adventure, especially in the winter. I’m never in a hurry to stand outside and freeze.

The next question is where. Finding a public-accessible spot that has a relatively clear view facing north with a fairly safe place to park isn’t easy. Someone in one of the Facebook groups had posted the Google Maps directions to a small parking lot at a wildlife refuge that’s not quite an hour north from me. Rather than do a bunch of research of other potential locations and waste time, I decided to give it a shot.

I got there shortly after sunset and was surprisingly one of only 3 other cars. Someone had set up their camera outside and was sitting in their vehicle waiting. I sat for a minute and considered if I wanted to stay. The lot was in front of a large hill, which I didn’t love, plus it just seemed too safe of a location. I realize that’s ridiculous to say seeing as I just said finding a fairly safe place to park is important, but I like my photo excursions to have a little bit of adventure. When I’m photographing neon signs, sometimes the middle of the street is the best angle to get the shot from and I have to time my dash like Frogger. I’m ok with taking some measured risks to capture something. I decided to move on from the lot and see what else was around.

After driving up and down a few highways while it got darker, I picked a relatively flat and wide spot on the side of the road right before a small bridge over a creek. It was big enough that I could pull a safe distance off to the side and not have to put my hazards on to be visible for oncoming cars (I didn’t want the blinking to potentially end up in the photos). I got out and did a test shot with my phone since it can be hard to tell the difference between clouds and aurora with the naked eye, and the sky was bright green. I got my tripod set up, fiddled with my camera, and started the timelapse. Then I had to stop it.

My camera, no matter what I did, did not want to focus. I kept trying all the tricks and the focus just did not want to lock. I was getting increasingly frustrated when I noticed a bright pillar of light appear in the sky on the opposite side of the road. As a car was coming, I quickly turned my camera so I could focus on the bridge guard rail that was being illuminated by the headlights and took a test shot. Brilliant purple pillars in the distance. I locked in the focus and crossed the road.

Thankfully I had cooperation from my camera and I settled in (as much as one can settle in outside at night in below freezing temperatures) for about 20 minutes of photos. When the strength of activity had somewhat died down, I decided it was probably a good time to head home.

On the way, I passed the small parking lot I had briefly parked in earlier which was now completely full and vehicles had overflowed onto the shoulder along the highway. I shook my head and congratulated myself for choosing to look elsewhere. I kept glancing out my window at the sky as I drove, just in case maybe I was wrong about things dying down. I suddenly saw several huge streaks overhead. I pulled over, rolled down my window, and took a photo with my phone. Bright pink. The shoulder wasn’t very wide or flat and without four wheel drive I always hesitate to pull too far off a highway into dirt which could be mud, so I kept driving.

I came to an intersection and turned down a county road. It was a great spot, a big flat field. As I pulled over the sky became brighter and filled with movement. I set up my camera, started the timelapse, realized power lines were in the frame, moved the camera, and started again. (I tend to get a little frantic when I’m excited.) After watching a couple shots to make sure everything was working well, I ignored the camera to take in the incredible intensity all around me. I was in complete awe. Then I looked at the street sign I had parked by.

If you’re familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”

In the grand scheme of things, it’s likely just a street sign. At times, however, I like to consider that maybe I’m getting little nudges from something I don’t quite understand to help me move along.

During the exposure of the photo above, a car appeared in the distance. I initially lamented it, thinking it’d ruin the photo but when the preview came on the screen I was pleasantly surprised by how the light burst added a magical flare to the scene.

As it got later and I could no longer feel my toes or fingertips, I decided to pack it in. I drove home elated about the timing and the location. I felt fairly confident that the timelapses would  work out and I was really excited to see the results. I thought maybe I had gotten a few decent still shots as well, but didn’t care quite so much about that.

When I woke up and started checking Facebook, it was a deluge of green and pink swirls. Hundreds of spectacular photos flooded the groups, some of them were not like anything I had seen. I started to get a little twinge of envy, a familiar feeling as a photographer. I dismissed it and went to assemble my timelapses. Because I was taking the photos at one second intervals, the videos ended up being a lot longer than I thought they would which I was really happy about. (I’m absolutely terrible at the math for how the number of photos equates to video length.) I wished I had gotten to my second location just a hair sooner than I had in order to capture a bit more of the intensity, but I was still incredibly pleased with the result.

Then I turned to the series of county road sign photos. I had several, with and without the light flare, and I chose to work on editing the one with the largest flare. The more I tinkered with it, though, the more I went back and forth between loving it and thinking it’s poorly composed and weird. I kept walking away and coming back, thinking looking at it with fresh eyes might make a difference, but the feeling of unease about it didn’t go away.

After mulling it over, I realized that my feelings were a result of going through other people’s photos. I was allowing my past to become the present and getting all caught up in my head about what used to be my expectation for my nature photography—getting “the” shot. The perfectly composed, perfectly crisp idyllic shot that doesn’t include street signs or light flare from headlights. The shot that follows the unspoken rule about eliminating most signs of humanity from nature photography other than the “perfect” kind: the winding road with no potholes or the hiker with a wardrobe that coordinates with the surroundings.

But that’s not what I set out to photograph, nor am I that photographer anymore.

Who I am now is the person who set the goal of capturing the incredible experience of viewing a ghostly, fluctuating sky, and I got exactly what I wanted with the two timelapses. Yet here this one image was pulling me into a tornado of my past, my competitive nature, and feelings of inadequacy.

The internal debate about whether or not I liked this photo ultimately reminded me that I need to focus on what I was able to do and ignore the rest. Feeling unaccomplished for not achieving something that was outside of my goal is partially a result of the social conditioning that we need to overachieve in order to be valued. What I didn’t do is unimportant. Meeting the goal that I set is enough.

The sign brought me to an important realization, and realizations can be magic, too. The universe rarely works in the ways you expect.