00:00:02 Brooklyn Phillips
Hi, welcome to Naturally Speaking, a podcast by Nature of North. I'm Brooklyn, and I'll be your host for this episode.
00:00:10 Brooklyn Phillips
Have you been lucky enough to see the Northern Lights this year? Or at least gotten one of those texts telling you to go outside right now? Here in the North Country, it feels like the aurora have been everywhere lately. But what actually is the Northern Lights? Why have we been seeing them more often? And what's really happening above us when those colors start to move across the sky.
00:00:33 Brooklyn Phillips
In this episode, I talked with three different people who are all knowledgeable on the subject and have become captured by our northern skies. First, I talked to an astronomy professor at St. Lawrence University and trustee of the Adirondack Sky Center and Observatory.
00:00:52 Aileen O'Donoghue
I'm Aileen O'Donoghue. I've taught at St. Lawrence for well over 35 years and I'm an astronomer by research. I'm very excited to learn about nature, particularly the physical world, the Earth.
00:01:11 Aileen O'Donoghue
I was a geology major for a while. The Earth, the sky, the universe. I'm interested in life, but that's not what I want to study. I want to study the cosmos, galaxies is what I actually study. The aurora is when particles from the sun collide with particles in our atmosphere and those collisions produce light. Now the particles, the sun is always shedding particles because the sun, like all stars, is a nuclear explosion contained by gravity.
00:01:47 Aileen O'Donoghue
Gravity is holding it together. There is a nuclear explosion in the center of the sun trying to blow it apart, and so it's an explosion, and particles are flying off the surface. The surface, although much cooler than the center, where the temperature is about 20 million degrees, or 20 million Kelvin, the surface is only about 5,800 Kelvin, but particles are flying off because it's so hot. And also the sun has a very strong magnetic field. And the magnetic field gets wrapped up around the sun and twisted. And so that when it twists, it sometimes sends these bubbles of ionized particles toward the earth.
00:02:36 Aileen O'Donoghue
They're called coronal mass ejections, and those blobs of hot ionized plasma collide with Earth's magnetic field. Charged particles don't cross magnetic field lines. They get caught and they spiral along magnetic field lines, and so Earth's magnetic field blocks the blobs from hitting the surface of the Earth, and instead the particles get funneled up toward the magnetic poles. And there they collide with particles in the atmosphere, and that's why we see the aurora high in the north, the aurora borealis, and also in the south, the aurora australis.
00:03:20 Aileen O'Donoghue
And so depending on how powerful the blob of plasma is, they can be very spectacular. In 1859, an event called the Carrington Event, a particularly powerful blob, hit the earth, and this was in 1859. They had just strung telegraph wires all over North America and Europe. Well, not all over, but a few places in North America and Europe, and the aurora, these charged particles flying around, they create electric currents, and the electric currents flowing along these telegraph wires actually shorted out on the poles and caused them to catch fire, sometimes causing forest fires.
00:04:07 Aileen O'Donoghue
In 1989, powerful currents running along the power lines of Hydro-Quebec actually knocked out all the power in the province of Quebec due to an aurora in, this was in 1989.
00:04:25 Aileen O'Donoghue
So in 1859 and 1989, we had these powerful auroras. So auroras aren't just fun and games and beautiful. They can be very dangerous because they are this dynamic connection between the earth and sun. And the sun is so powerful. We see it every day, so we don't think about it, but it's really an awesome thing. It is a nuclear explosion contained by gravity.
00:04:54 Brooklyn Phillips
Is there something that makes it more powerful?
00:04:57 Aileen O'Donoghue
Just the blob that happens to...
00:04:59 Aileen O'Donoghue
Yeah.
00:05:00 Aileen O'Donoghue
Well, not completely random.
00:05:02 Aileen O'Donoghue
The sun, the blobs are connected to sunspots, which are particular twists in the magnetic field, where the magnetic field of the sun kind of bulges out of its surface. And that bulge can then cut itself off and become the coronal mass ejection, the blob, the CME. And the number of sunspots increases and decreases over a fairly regular period of 11 years.
00:05:32 Aileen O'Donoghue
So about every 11 years, we have a peak in the number of sunspots.
00:05:36 Aileen O'Donoghue
And we've just been through this. In 24 and 25, we had a peak. Now we're in 26, we're coming off the peak. And so that the sunspot activity will be getting less.
00:05:50 Aileen O'Donoghue
One of the reasons that Artemis II is on its way to the moon now in 2026 is that we want to get our astronauts onto the moon during solar minimum when there aren't very many sunspots, because when they're at the moon, they are outside of Earth's protective magnetic field.
00:06:11 Aileen O'Donoghue
So these astronauts will be exposed to more radiation than those of us on Earth. We had a solar max in 2001. And so as we were coming off of it in 2002 and 2003, in 2003 and 2004, actually, we had spectacular aurora.
00:06:32 Aileen O'Donoghue
I stood in my yard in Potsdam and I was looking up the rays of the aurora, which means that they were bright and they were very visible. They were very bright. They were red and green. They were waving over my head. It was utterly spectacular. And I saw it from Potsdam. So it can still happen.
00:06:54 Aileen O'Donoghue
And these powerful blobs of plasma, they can come at us any time. It doesn't necessarily have to be a solar max. And so, yes, the chances are less than we'll see a terrific aurora now that we're past solar max, but there's always a chance.
00:07:16 Brooklyn Phillips
Then I talked to an astrophysics PhD candidate who actually got interested in the aurora right here in the North Country.
00:07:25 Tyler Karasinski
So my name is Tyler Karasinski. I am a second year astrophysics PhD candidate at Arizona State University. My research specifically focuses on upper atmosphere dynamics. So we have a camera in interior Alaska that takes an image during nighttime hours every 10 seconds. So we're getting everything from waves in the atmosphere, turbulence, things like that, are serious drivers of circulation and momentum transfer.
00:07:51 Tyler Karasinski
But we're also getting aurora in the near infrared spectrum, which is super cool to see, like little ripples of instabilities. Kind of like an ocean surface just in the atmosphere, since the air is a fluid just like water. So yeah, that's a little bit of everything dozens of kilometers up, basically.
00:08:09 Brooklyn Phillips
Interesting. So what got you interested in wanting to study the Aurora?
00:08:14 Tyler Karasinski
It's so cliche. So Eileen probably told you, I did galaxies when I was at St. Lawrence, because that's what Eileen specializes in. And I don't know, so when I did my semester abroad, I did it in New Zealand, and I ended up seeing the Southern Lights there. And then being in the North Country, there was always like that rumor, as I'm sure you know, like, maybe we'll see the Aurora tonight, maybe, not. And just seeing those lights, I got really like stoked about it. It felt very tangible and very real to see it above me. And I wanted to study it. So that's where the switch came in for a field of research.
00:08:55 Brooklyn Phillips
Wow, so it all started in the North Country.
00:08:59 Tyler Karasinski
Kind of, pretty much.
00:09:00 Brooklyn Phillips
Interest in it, like your just hope of seeing it one day. Have you ever like experienced the Aurora here in the North Country? Like anything that like.
00:09:08 Tyler Karasinski
Nothing.
00:09:09 Tyler Karasinski
Well, okay, so I kind of, so I graduated in 2024, which means that every time that St. Lawrence over the last year has posted like, oh, you know, the lights over the North Country, I wasn't there. And my one claim to fame would have been May 2024, right when I was about to graduate. Whenever my lab group goes to conferences, we have like mental bingo cards of like, this is something that's going to get mentioned.
00:09:38 Tyler Karasinski
And the May 2024 storm, some call it the Gannon storm, some call it the Mother's Day storm. That is always at the center of the bingo card. It's basically the free space. And I went out to a farm north of Canton and sat in a field.
00:09:54 Tyler Karasinski
I dragged like half of the Arts Annex out there with me and we all sat there and it was completely cloudy all night and we saw nothing. So I'm still a little petty about that one.
00:10:04 Brooklyn Phillips
So I know you kind of like talked about like how you guys see the particles in the sky, but how do you actually like study or like what tools or methods do you use?
00:10:14 Tyler Karasinski
Sure. So my lab group primarily uses a technique called ground-based imaging. Essentially, we have a camera that is, I don't know, maybe the size of my torso. And you position it with a fisheye lens, 185 degrees raw field of view, and every 10 seconds, it's taking a picture of the near-infrared spectrum, the entire night sky.
00:10:38 Tyler Karasinski
And from one good night of data, when the Arctic winter, the nights are the longest, you can get 5,000 images of aurora, turbulence in the atmosphere, things like that.mWe're specifically looking for a very diffuse continuous emission called Airglow. And this is similar to Aurora because it's a light emission. It's very faint, but it's very, you can see it in the optical spectrum from the International Space Station, which is really cool. And it comes from these chemical interactions in the upper atmosphere.
00:11:11 Tyler Karasinski
That's what we're looking at, because it makes all of these dynamics and waves and turbulence in our atmosphere, especially that high up, visible to us, visible to our camera. So we get a lot of aurora in that, things like pulsating aurora, which are like, if you ever mix paint in a paint can, you know, like when you first put the dyes in, you get like those weird ripples and swirls on the top. It looks just like that, and it's flashing.
00:11:36 Tyler Karasinski
And so we get to see that with our imager, which is super cool. We see your classic, like discrete, like dancing arcs, dancing ribbons. And we're able to, because we're taking pictures so frequently, make conclusions on the morphology, the shape, the frequency of these events, which is pretty neat, especially over multiple years, because this camera's been running since 2021. So it's great for diagnosing long scale trends.
00:12:04 Brooklyn Phillips
Interesting.
00:12:05 Brooklyn Phillips
Is there anything like new that you've learned over these past few years or like anything that scientists are like just learning about the Aurora?
00:12:11 Tyler Karasinski
Oh, sure. There's a lot of different types of Aurora for one thing. So of course, you're going to have your regular dancing ribbons. And that's what everybody sees on like the postcard, right? And we know those pretty well, I would say. They come from a variety of different, you know, chemical interactions, different molecules that get excited from the solar radiation.
00:12:34 Tyler Karasinski
But there's other types too that we're still figuring out. It's like pulsating aurora for one. There aren't, there, I'm not, you never want to say there aren't studies on something, but it's only a growing field of interest. Vincent might have mentioned to you, he was on a campaign recently doing some imaging to complement a sounding rocket mission, studying what people are calling dark aurora. And if you ever see an image of Aurora, and it looks like there's this very dark band kind of in between the two ribbons of light that kind of dances with the ribbons. It almost looks empty to your eye.
00:13:17 Tyler Karasinski
People are studying that now too, because that's something that may have gone a little underestimated at first, or not underestimated, but underrepresented. And so people are trying to figure out what's exactly going on there. Why is that sort of this boundary region between the two ribbons, what's going on with that? So yeah of course you want that postcard picture perfect aurora, but there's other light emission going on up there that I think we're still piecing together little by little.
00:13:41 Tyler Karasinski
So my lab group is running a citizen science project. And if you're not familiar, citizen science is we ask volunteers and everyday members of the public to participate in our research because it's the manpower required to classify all of these images we're getting in is more than the four of us here in our lab group can handle. And so all of our images, all of our video clips we take with our camera in Alaska, you can go online if you Google the Gravity Wave Zoo. You can go online and you can actually help us with our research by classifying and saying, yes, I see Aurora here. No, I don't see Aurora here. Yes, I see waves here or ripples or turbulence or whatever. And actually, I just published a research paper on this project back in January.
00:14:29 Tyler Karasinski
So it's really useful. It's great research. And, you know, you guys can get involved. So definitely go check it out if you want to check out the Aurora and the camera that I am using for my everyday job.
00:14:41 Brooklyn Phillips
I know, Nature of North does something similar with citizen science, getting the people involved in their everyday sightings and it contributes to something in the long run. So that's a good thing.
00:14:54 Brooklyn Phillips
And finally, I spoke with Vincent Ledvina, a space physics PhD student who studies auroras every day and spends his nights chasing them and documenting them in Alaska.
00:15:05 Vincent Ledvina
My name is Vincent Ledvina. I am a third-year space physics PhD student here at University of Alaska Fairbanks. My research primarily centers around what are called auroral substorms, which are like these big explosions of auroral activity that happen every single night. And that can obviously create amazing auroral displays that are super pretty and beautiful, but can also affect spacecraft that are flying above the aurora. There's a lot of electricity and radiation that could cause them harm, so they're important to study.
00:15:38 Vincent Ledvina
I became interested in the Northern Lights and the aurora when I was actually four years old. I grew up in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I saw the aurora during one of the largest geomagnetic storms of the solar cycle, Solar Cycle 24. And I was four years old, but I think that experience really pushed me to love the outdoors, nature, and also the night sky. So became interested again in photography and the night sky and auroras when I was in high school.
00:16:05 Vincent Ledvina
Moved up to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where I went for my bachelor's in physics at University of North Dakota. Did a lot of aurora chasing up there. That's really where I cut my teeth. And it's not in Alaska, so you have to pay attention to the data and the science to time it right where you can see the aurora. So that was really fun.
00:16:22 Vincent Ledvina
And then I moved up to Alaska in 2022, took a gap year, then enrolled at UAF starting in 2023. And that's where I've been since. Such an all-encompassing subject, the aurora. Like it has ties to not only like native Alaskan culture and like, you know, those types of traditions and those types of beliefs, which I find super fascinating. There's also the science of it, which is super interesting. And it is all tied to space weather, which more broadly can affect technology in space and on the ground, humans working in space, like astronauts, planes, so high altitude crew on planes and things like that. So it actually affects people.
00:17:05 Vincent Ledvina
So I've been interested in physics, but in like astrophysics for a while. But then when I found out space weather actually affects people, I was like, okay, so it's the same science, but it's everything that can affect humans. So I thought that was a really great, it just sort of makes the work that I want to do more impactful. Then of course, it's just beautiful, right? So like that's how I really became interested in it to begin with was that it was a beautiful thing and I was just inspired by it. So it like touches all these different parts of science, society, culture, the aurora.
00:17:36 Brooklyn Phillips
But yeah, so you're an aurora chaser. So what does that like mean? What does it mean to be an aurora chaser? What is it like chasing auroras?
00:17:45 Vincent Ledvina
Yeah, so it all depends on where you're at. So if you're in Alaska, in Fairbanks, let's say you're underneath the auroral oval, which there's two, there's one in the northern hemisphere, one in the southern hemisphere. That's where the auroras can be seen every single night, no matter what, as long as it's clear and dark.
00:17:59 Vincent Ledvina
It needs to be clear. So need to have clear skies. But so it's not so much chasing the aurora as much because it's just out every single night as it is chasing these substorms, these big explosions of activity and making sure that you're out when those happen. Because the aurora basically goes from like 0 to 100 in a matter of minutes, in a matter of minutes, and then kind of dies back down after like 10, 15 minutes of this huge burst of activity. So it's about timing and also being in the right place where there's clear skies.
00:18:29 Vincent Ledvina
Right now it's March. It's the best time to visit. So there's a lot of clear skies. So it's not too hard to find clear skies right now. But like in the winter, like I just say more deep into the winter, like, you know, January, November and December, February, it's a little bit cloudier, especially in the fall too it's cloudier. So it's not as much aurora chasing as it is clear skies chasing and then just waiting for the right moment.
00:18:52 Vincent Ledvina
If you're down at mid-latitudes, even as far south as like Arizona, Florida, Texas, like it is possible to see the aurora, but you need active space weather. So that actually is kind of like chasing because you're chasing the data and you're watching the data kind of like a storm chaser. You're watching the forecasts of like the severe weather. You're watching the forecasts of the severe space weather. And then you're looking at things developing in real time, like a storm chaser might be looking at a radar and looking at storm cells. You're kind of looking at, you know, what is the solar wind strength? You know, what is the earth doing because of that? How is the magnetic field responding? So when you're at mid-latitudes, and like you're doing the same thing at high latitudes in Alaska, but at mid-latitudes, you really do have very small windows of opportunity to see the northern lights.
00:19:39 Brooklyn Phillips
Yeah, I mean, it feels like patience has a lot to do with it. Is that like a big aspect? By just waiting around.
00:19:46 Vincent Ledvina
Yeah, patience is, you don't really become, you don't really learn patience until you go aurora chasing, or you don't really learn about, yeah, patience or expectations when you're, you know, until you start watching space weather.
00:20:00 Vincent Ledvina
Like you might see a big solar storm launching off the sun, you're getting prepared for a huge display, and then that solar storm just never materializes, like it completely misses Earth for whatever reason. So you just have to have your expectations at 0, basically all the time when you're an aurora chaser and have your hopes high. And if you can do that, you'll never be disappointed.
00:20:20 Vincent Ledvina
Yeah. So if you're up north and up north, like in the lower 48, you know, New York, Minnesota, I'm from the Twin Cities. So yeah, up north would be like North Shore of Minnesota, like Boundary Waters. You just have to watch the space weather and see if there's any kind of enhanced space weather activity.
00:20:36 Vincent Ledvina
So, you know, people are not all obsessed about it like I am, so I totally get that. But the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center will release geomagnetic storm watches, usually a few days before they may occur. So if people just sign up for like those alerts, whenever there's a watch that's released, you can get like an e-mail or a text like, Hey, there's a, you know, minor geomagnetic storm that could happen on Friday, right? Then as somebody who's just interested in the aurora, you know, wants to see it, that on Friday, there's a chance for the storm to happen. And then that's when you switch over to monitoring conditions. It's just like a storm chaser.
00:21:12 Vincent Ledvina
You see like the space or the Storm Prediction Center releases like a high chance of severe weather. And that's in three days. It's like, okay, I'm marking that on my calendar that I'm going to start paying attention to the news and, you know, the weather radars and things like that on Friday, let's say it's Tuesday today. So that's my advice is just knowing when these things are happening so that you're not caught off guard.
00:21:34 Vincent Ledvina
Like we can predict space weather to some degree. You can get like pop-up auroras sometimes. So there's always an element of chance and just being in the right place at the right time. But a lot of times these auroras that are seen at mid-latitudes, which would be like the northern tier of the US, central US, those happen because of some enhanced activity and we can kind of predict when that can happen.
00:21:54 Vincent Ledvina
So my biggest piece of advice is just being aware of space weather and what's going on, like following it just like you would the regular weather. You know, even with enhanced activity, like let's say there's a storm happening, geomagnetic storm. Aurora is still not guaranteed. You just have to have some element of nature be on your side and also clear skies too. I'm assuming it's clear, right, in all these situations, but that's often the biggest hurdle is finding a clear sky. And if you're in a city trying to drive north of that town or city so that you're not in a big light pollution bubble, because oftentimes the aurora's on the horizon. So that's when it becomes bright is when you're looking on the horizon.
00:22:34 Vincent Ledvina
There's cities that are, far away from you, but you have these little bubbles of light pollution. So trying to get, east or west or north of a city, you don't want to go south because you're looking back into what you just drove out of, right? That's not going to help. But yeah, assuming that you're in a dark sky and it's clear, you know, if you're going to see aurora or not, that really depends on how active space weather is.
00:22:57 Vincent Ledvina
And you can predict that to some degree, right? But a lot of times it is just like, if there's a prediction and it doesn't come true, then that's just what happens. Nature will do what it wants to do.
00:23:06 Vincent Ledvina
Last couple of years, like 2024 to 2026, have been the most active years in two decades, basically, for auroras. Like we've had, there's this scale of geomagnetic storms that goes from G1 to G5. G5 storms are very rare. Like there's a solar cycle that happens like every 11 years. And so typically in one solar cycle, you only see one or two G5s.
00:23:29 Vincent Ledvina
This solar cycle, we've had one. We've almost had like 3. Those other two just came just shy of that G5 line. But we've had a lot of G4s, you know, more than other solar cycles, certainly more than the last one, which peaked in 2014, roughly, 2013. So it's been actually a really active couple of years. And it should just be active throughout 2026 and then in the 2027. And then slowly decreasing in terms of the frequency of geomagnetic storms as we go down to solar minimum. So we kind of maxed out in terms of solar activity in 2024. The auroral activity peak for various reasons is about a year or two after the solar activity peak. So we're kind of in that peak of auroral activity right now. So yeah, it's been good.
00:24:15 Vincent Ledvina
People with smartphones are able to photograph them now, whereas last solar cycle, which peaked in 2014, you had to have a fancy camera to take a photo of the Aurora. And a lot of times the cameras can see a lot more than your eyes. So oftentimes they can actually see it and your eyes can't at all. So you have people that are out there with phones taking great photos and you know that that gets people motivated.
00:24:36 Brooklyn Phillips
Yeah. Is there like a trick or like a hack to like take the best picture?
00:24:43 Vincent Ledvina
Good question. It's really not that hard, especially with these modern smartphones. Like you just hold it up at the sky and you tap it and then it goes. Like it's pretty cool.
00:24:55 Vincent Ledvina
A little hack is on iPhones, if you have it on a tripod or if you place it down on something that's solid and it's not moving at all, it will unlock this 30-second exposure time mode, which can let in a lot more light and can make you see better colors in the Aurora and like really faint auroral displays better. And so it helps to buy like even a cheap tripod and just put your phone on that and then have like an external like little button that you can press to have it take a photo. That can improve the quality quite a bit.
00:25:27 Vincent Ledvina
You know, I just post Auroras. So if people like the Aurora, that's just my thing. And that's what I've committed to and I love to do it. So my handle is just my first and last name, Vincent Ledvina. And I'm on every single social media platform, I post about upcoming activity, like, that could affect the entire lower 48, cause auroras down there. For people in the lower 48, like I said, just sort of being aware that space weather happens and you don't need to necessarily wait for like a really strong storm.
00:25:58 Vincent Ledvina
If you have a camera and you're willing to invest some time into learning about the science and how the substorms work and these big flare ups of auroral activity, like, They're not random. There's patterns to the behavior of the aurora. So kind of learning a little bit about that can improve your chances. Joining communities like on Facebook and stuff, like people will help you out. The aurora chasing community is just broadly like around the world, like very friendly people. And then, different communities for different places, right?
00:26:30 Vincent Ledvina
So if you're in New York, there's like an upper, there's like an upstate New York Facebook group that I think I'm in, even though I don't live there. But they're posting all the time about auroras and like, hey, there's this thing coming. You guys should, you know, be aware that in three days we might have this big solar storm, could have auroras down to Albany or something.
00:26:47 Vincent Ledvina
I don't know. So there's a lot of like depth to seeing the aurora, like it's obviously something that you can even go to school for. I mean, I'm not studying aurora chasing, but I'm studying the science of the aurora. So, you know, this goes all the way from like, hey, I just want to photograph it, you know, during a G5 and you can basically be sleeping underneath a rock and you'll see it on NBC News, you know, the night before, you know, the night of like, hey, great auroras.
00:27:13 Vincent Ledvina
Like you could be totally tuned out or you could be getting a PhD in it. So it is a whole field and that's kind of cool.
00:27:21 Brooklyn Phillips
And with that, this is Brooklyn signing off and encouraging you to get connected to nature and look up at our skies. So get up and get outdoors with Nature Up North