"Suddenly, the whole sky just exploded! And for us, you know, you get goosebumps - every single time - it's different."
- Dr. Pål Brekke
Location Whitehorse, Canada
Experience Aurora chasing
Guide and photography Sean Norman
The aurora is a special kind of love for me. It is a passion, and it is a lifestyle - one I have chased for 15 years. It is my everything to share my love of this experience with you.
Long drives for starry skies
Some nights our chase will require drives hundreds of kilometres, creeping through blizzards or fog, and returning home late. Really late. I’ll never compromise our safety, but when we need to trust in weather maps, travel further, or hang tight with patience, it will be our plan. The greatest geographical limit we place on our chase is ensuring we have enough fuel to return.
Roadtrip hygge
All tours will be in my cosy 3 row Toyota Sienna, with seating for 7 guests. We’ll keep our nightly capacity at just 5-6 guests for maximum comfort.
In the winter, we will of course keep the van running through the night so you can warm up back inside any time you wish. Warm drinks and home baking will await you.
Love for the process
As we leave behind the city lights of Whitehorse, the best game of hide and seek begins. Using a variety of earth weather and space weather information, we’ll travel the highways in search of the best locations likely to give us views of the renowned and mystical northern lights.
Finding a safe and favourable location, we’ll huddle around the car and touch on some of the beautiful tales and legends that follow our lady aurora. But just don't wave at her, because she may come down and take you away from the earth…
The beginning of our night will provide the perfect opportunity to look over your camera settings and ensure you’re well set up and comfortable with your camera. I would still suggest for you to read through a photography guide I’ve written here. If you’d like to borrow a tripod for the night, I will have some spares with us that you’re welcome to.
As we arrive into clear skies, we’ll take a little time to do some searching in the sky for any signs of the aurora. And before the northern lights become too much of a source of light pollution, we can enjoy some light stargazing where there's always a few stories to be told - one of which is the hope that tonight is the night the star Betelgeuse finally explodes. But if not tonight, then tomorrow night, or the night after that - any day now actually, which in astronomy terminology, is sometime within the next couple hundred thousand years. Cross your fingers.
Cloudy nights, long drives, and location details
When on the nights the weather requires us to, we will drive hundreds of kilometres. If it's cloudy in and around Whitehorse, I'm not going to sit us at a highway pullout 20 kilometres outside of town and call it a night if there are clear skies or clear patches much further away but still within reach.
To contrast, on clear nights we won't make a habit of shuffling around to a different location every half hour. The aurora can be incredibly dynamic and unpredictable, and I'm not particularly interested in potentially getting caught on the highway with nowhere to pullover when out of nowhere, a beautiful burst of aurora fills the sky.
Naturally, the aurora operates on her own schedule, which means I don’t place a lot of importance on the duration of our tour. Sometimes we will have later nights than usual, but sometimes we’ll wrap up earlier than you might expect too. We’ll consider the weather both at present and in the short term forecast, how far we’ve travelled, and what we might expect of the aurora still.
