Late in the evening, Kai Haase knows to watch for them. The dancing green lights will first appear faint, but they come alive after dark.
Though this night in early May was cloudier that most, Haase had managed to snap the first vestiges of northern lights on the horizon with her phone. By midnight, they’re directly over where she is commonly found parked in her car—down at the boat launch by the river in Fort Saskatchewan, her hometown northeast of Edmonton.
Haase, 43, a part-time receptionist and full-time mom who immigrated to Alberta from Thailand in 2014, wells with anticipation by day. Her aurora sighting app pings notifications of solar activity on her phone, indicating when the colourful geomagnetic phenomena are imminent. She watches the KP index, which tells of geomagnetic activity, and BZ index, which gives her solar wind data.
Before a promising evening, she‘ll power nap during the day because she’ll probably be out photographing auroras with her friends until well past midnight.
Back in her home country she'd never even seen an aurora.
“I don’t have chance to see this thing ever, so I would like to share these experiences with my friends and family in Thailand,” Haase told The Epoch Times. “And photography helps me enhance my creation and to use my free time in a more productive way that I enjoy.”
After about an hour of waiting on this particular night, and after Haase’s friends had arrived, the green lights were no longer just a dim ribbon on the horizon but a blazing emerald fire above their heads. She uses her smartphone to photograph them instead of an SLR. Smartphones have an uncanny ability to display auroras, she says, like no reflex camera can.
Sometimes, Haase’s husband, James, and their young son, Rawly, tag along (Rawly makes a good model when a foreground subject is needed, she says), but these excursions are mostly just for Haase, adding a little adventure and escape to her sometimes monotonous home life.
“I have a lot of free time and just stay home,” she said. “That’s why I try to find something to inspire me to keep going on what I do.”
That inspiration first began in 2019 when Haase browsed Fort Saskatchewan’s community Facebook page and started seeing local aurora-sighting ads. She joined in the fun at the West River’s Edge Boat Launch and has been photographing and studying auroras ever since. Soon, she found that many aurora enthusiasts online really appreciated the photos she was posting.
Late fall 2024 presented an especially marvellous spectacle of auroras, she said; a huge geomagnetic storm on the sun was the cause. Her husband, who is fascinated with astrophotography, even managed to photograph a sunspot—a telltale symptom of solar activity—which probably triggered those auroras.
Solar wind from magnetic storms, she explains, travels to Earth and interacts with the planet’s magnetic field. This causes a concentration of charged ion particles that gather at Earth’s magnetic polar regions. And when those particles interact with different gasses in the atmosphere, hundreds of kilometres above the surface, they produce various colours depending on their altitude.
“What I know is, in the lower level [of the atmosphere] they produce the green colour, and when it goes above, nitrogen produces more colours,” Haase said.
Green is the most common colour in auroras, but during particularly strong storms they can get downright extravagant in their rainbow display.
Not only Haase, but the global aurora community watched in awe last October as aurora spectacles unfolded. From the boat launch, she photographed green as well as red, yellow, purple, and even blue lights overhead. Some of the auroras were so intense they could be seen within town limits—even over Haase’s front yard.
“It’s like, everywhere,” she said. “I can just sit there all night until it’s done.”
