She saved this one for me

Every year I wait for this night.

The forecast wasn't promising. A KP of 4, maybe. Nothing spectacular on paper. The kind of night most aurora chasers would look at, shrug, and stay in with a book. But I've learned that the forecast is only ever half the story - you can have a "quiet" night that lights up the whole sky, and a "big" night that fizzles into nothing. The sky doesn't check the report.

So I went out.

Fingers crossed. Camera ready. High hopes and hand warmers tucked in my coat pocket like good-luck charms.

And oh, was I rewarded.

She came in soft at first - a low green glow along the horizon, the shy start every aurora seems to make when she's checking to see if anyone's watching. Then the pillars started to rise. Then the curtains began to move. Then, the thing I always hope for and rarely see - the red came in.

That's the part I can't get over. Red aurora is rare. It happens high up in the atmosphere where the oxygen is thin, and it takes just the right conditions to show up at all. To have it on my first night of the season, with a KP of 4, made me feel like I could reach up and touch the heavens. I firmly believe that the sky was leaning down to say hello, welcome back, I saved this one for you.

The pictures in this slideshow were shot back-to-back over about ten minutes of real time - fifty-seven frames, each one about a ten-second exposure. And this is just a small slice of the night. I was out there for two full hours, and I came home with hundreds of pictures. What you're watching here is one tiny window into a much longer show. But it's my favorite ten minutes, and the red was doing its thing, and I wanted you to see her the way I saw her. You can watch the curtains move with the solar winds. You can see the light rise and fall. You can watch a whole conversation between the sun and the sky, translated into color, happening at the top of the world.

These shots are barely edited - I straightened the horizon and that's it. I didn't want to touch anything else. This is how she actually looked, on a night that wasn't supposed to be much, standing on a beach with my camera and my luck.

Every year I wait for this. And every year, when the first show finally comes, I remember why.

Sometimes the forecast is wrong in the best possible way.