In April of 2021, I went to Grief Point Park to try and capture the Milky Way. I had limited success due to the amount of clouds. A little frustrated I played with the images in Photoshop and noticed that there started to be light and colour from the cities light pollution in the clouds in a way that I imagined aurora to look like. I liked the end result; it even made the local paper, qathet Living. At the time I was very convinced that the aurora or northern lights occurred only to the north of us and this kind of image was pure imagination.
Fast forward to a couple nights ago and I was proven wrong. On August 11th we got surprising aurora numbers, like huge for around here, so I headed out to the usual spot and did what I always did, it was a fantastic towering display, lights all the way overhead, and even to the south. When the sprinklers came on at Mowat I knew it was time to go knew it was time to go elsewhere. As an aside: someone needs to tell the city that the free unexpected carwash from misaligned sprinkler heads is not helping the lawn.
From the Westview ferry terminal we were treated to some amazing pulsating auroras of incredible intensity and surprisingly they were very much to the west, even southwest of us. It was truly awe inspiring and I was happy to have been proven wrong.
