Late at night, Kai Haase knew it was time to pay attention to them. The dancing green lights, at first appearing faint, would come alive in the darkness.
Even though the night in early May was cloudier than usual, Haase managed to capture the initial traces of the aurora borealis on the northern horizon using her phone. By midnight, she often parked her car at the docks by the Fort Saskatchewan River, her hometown located in the northeast of Edmonton, where the aurora borealis would be unfolding directly above her head.
Haase mentioned that the darkness of the night could sometimes be intimidating. Eager for company, she would often post photos of witnessing the aurora borealis on Facebook, hoping to attract her friends to join her in chasing the lights. “Want to come with me?” she would caption her posts. Her friends would usually hurry to join her.
At 43 years old, Haase works part-time as a receptionist and is a full-time mother who immigrated to Alberta from Thailand in 2014. During the day, she eagerly anticipates the night. The aurora observing app on her phone would notify her when solar activity is high, alerting her of the impending colorful geomagnetic phenomenon. She would also check the KP Index (measuring geomagnetic activity intensity) and the BZ Index (providing solar wind data).
On a night that could potentially display the aurora, she would take a nap during the day, as she would likely be out with her friends chasing the lights and taking photos until late into the night.
Having never seen the aurora borealis in her native Thailand, Haase expressed her desire to share these experiences with her friends and family back home. In an interview with The Epoch Times, she said, “Photography also helps me spark creativity and allows me to pass my leisure time in a more enjoyable way.”
After waiting for about an hour on one particular night, her friends arrived, and the green lights were no longer just faint bands on the horizon but a shimmering emerald flame directly above. She opted to capture these auroras using her phone rather than a traditional camera. She noted that smartphones possess a magical ability when it comes to capturing the aurora borealis, surpassing traditional cameras.
Occasionally, Haase’s husband James and their young son Rawly would accompany her (she mentioned that Rawly makes a great foreground model for photos), but most of these aurora-chasing adventures were solitary expeditions for her, providing an escape and a sense of adventure from the sometimes monotonous family life.
“I have a lot of free time, and I don’t want to just stay at home,” she said. “So I wanted to find something that would inspire me to continue persevering.”
This inspiration began in 2019 when Haase started browsing the community Facebook page of Fort Saskatchewan and began seeing local posts about aurora viewing. She joined the observing activities at the West River Docks, starting her journey of capturing and researching the aurora borealis. Soon enough, she noticed that many online aurora enthusiasts greatly appreciated the photos she shared.
She recalled that the autumn auroras of 2024 were particularly spectacular, with a massive geomagnetic storm occurring on the sun. Her husband, who is deeply into astronomy photography, even captured a sunspot – a typical sign of solar activity, potentially the cause of those auroras.
Explaining further, Haase said that solar winds from the geomagnetic storm colliding with Earth’s magnetic field concentrated charged ions in the auroral zones. As these particles interacted with different gases in the high-altitude atmosphere, depending on the altitude, they produced auroras of various colors.
“I know that green appears in the lower atmospheric layers, and as you go higher, nitrogen produces more colors,” Haase explained.
The color green is the most common in auroras, but during particularly strong geomagnetic storms, auroras can display incredibly vivid rainbow effects.
Not only Haase, but aurora enthusiasts worldwide were also mesmerized by the auroral spectacle last October. At the docks, she captured green, red, yellow, purple, and even blue auroras. Some were so intense that they were visible within city limits — even right above the sky in front of Haase’s own front yard.
“It was everywhere,” she said. “I could just sit there all night, watching until the auroras faded away.”