Northern Lights over the Rockies: Richard Gottardo's Aurora Photos

Canadian photographer Richard Gottardo has a gift for giving the northern lights a place to land. In his aurora photographs from the Rocky Mountains, a yellow tent, the glow of a valley town and the dark outline of the peaks sit beneath curtains of green light, so the sky never floats free of the landscape. Alongside the stills, his time-lapse The Northern Lights follows a single night of aurora over Jasper National Park in Alberta.

An aurora camp above Revelstoke, British Columbia

The tent and town-light photographs were made on a spring outing near Revelstoke, in southeastern British Columbia. The town of about 8,300 people sits on the Columbia River, with the Selkirk Mountains and Glacier National Park to the east and Mount Revelstoke National Park just to the north. It lies on the Trans-Canada Highway and is a major snowmobiling destination, and Revelstoke Mountain Resort advertises the greatest lift-served vertical in North America, 1,713 metres.

That snowmobile country is what makes a winter camp like Gottardo's possible: sleds carry people and gear high above the valley, where a clear patch of sky can open up between storm systems. From up there, the lights of Revelstoke become a warm band below the cold green of the aurora.

What causes the green glow of the northern lights

The aurora borealis begins on the Sun. Charged particles, mainly electrons and protons, stream outward in the solar wind and in coronal mass ejections. When they disturb Earth's magnetosphere, particles are channelled toward the polar regions, where they strike oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and make them glow.

• Green, the most common colour, comes from atomic oxygen emitting at 557.7 nanometres. The sharp lower edge of many curtains marks the height, around 100 km, below which atomic oxygen thins out quickly.
• Red comes from oxygen at the highest altitudes and is usually seen only in strong displays.
• Blue and purple fringes come from molecular nitrogen lower down.

Auroras are seen most often in an oval about 660 km wide centred near 67° north. Geomagnetic storms push that oval south, which is how western Canada at around 51–53° north gets such vivid shows. In Gottardo's long exposures the stars also leave arcs as Earth rotates, a steady motion that contrasts with the shifting shapes of the aurora.

The Jasper time-lapse of 18 May 2013

The film was shot on 18 May 2013, when a coronal mass ejection launched by an X-class solar flare struck Earth a glancing blow. Gottardo took more than 1,800 photographs between midnight and four in the morning and condensed those four hours into a few minutes of moving sky. The soundtrack is by the band Pale Whale.

Jasper is an ideal stage for this. Established in 1907 as Jasper Forest Park, it covers about 10,878 km² and is the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies. It is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site, inscribed by UNESCO in 1984, and in 2011 the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada named it a dark-sky preserve because of its minimal light pollution.

Tips for seeing the aurora in the Canadian Rockies

• Go when the nights are dark. From late summer to spring the sky gets fully dark; around midsummer, twilight lingers at these latitudes.
• Watch the space-weather forecast. Strong displays follow coronal mass ejections; a high Kp index means the auroral oval is expanding south.
• Get away from lights and face north. A dark-sky park such as Jasper gives you a clean horizon.
• Use a tripod and long exposures, and include a foreground, as Gottardo does with his tent and the valley lights.

Dress for winter even in spring: clear aurora nights in the mountains are usually the coldest ones.

Explore more: Mike Taylor’s Maine aurora photographs; aurora seen from an aircraft window.

Related reading:

• The Arctic Light: Lofoten’s Long Spring Twilight
• Kakslauttanen’s Glass Igloos: A Room with a Sky View
• Aurora from Norway, Alaska and Orbit
• Abraham Lake’s Ice Bubbles: Layers beneath the Surface
• A Lake Louise Snowboard Lap with Blayne Campbell
• Silverthorne’s Ice Castle: Tunnels, Arches and Frozen Light
• More on the Northern Lights and time lapse films

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