The photos and video left Parks Canada’s Rogier Gruys ever-so-slightly jealous, as he had spent that evening waiting up for the auroral display, but called it a night a wink too early.
Gruys, a visitor experience product development specialist, is an aurora enthusiast, who checks multiple websites each day for the potential of aurora in Jasper.
“I look every night, pretty much,” he said, taking out his cellphone to pull up the Aurora Watch webpage. “Even my kids know to look on their mom’s iPhone.”
What they’re looking at is an aurora prediction.
“It’s like the weather forecast, really. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s not so great.”
The website, based in Alberta, shows bar graphs with bars in three colours: green, yellow and red. When there is a red bar right to the top, that means—as long as there are no clouds and the sky is dark—you’re almost guaranteed to see aurora.
Aurora is caused by explosions on the sun, said Gruys. “It all has to do with sunspots, which are actually black dots on the sun—that’s where there are eruptions of particles, and if they face Earth, those particles will come directly to Earth and they’re the ones that cause aurora.”
“So tells us what’s happening on the sun and then they say ‘OK. In two days time you can expect a big aurora because there’s this big eruption on the sun.’”
Any eruption that takes place takes about 48 hours to reach Earth, said Gruys.
“So aurora can be kind of predicted about two days in advance.”
The tough thing about aurora, though, is that it can only be seen when it’s dark, so although eruptions might be happening on the sun and aurora might be taking place, it’s not always visible.
“Like the other day there was aurora all over eastern Europe and in Siberia and they saw it, but it was daylight here, so we couldn’t see it,” said Matthew Parker, an amateur astronomer who can often be found with his telescope outside Coco’s Cafe.
“It’s hard to see in June and July because there’s not a lot of darkness, but once August comes we’ll see more.”
In fact, the best auroral display Parker’s ever seen was last August. The Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge employee stood outside his staff accommodation staring at the sky as it light up in an unusual way.
“Instead of curtains of light dancing, the way we think of aurora, literally huge patches in the sky were lighting up and turning off. The whole sky was going flash, flash, flash. It was pretty cool.”
Like Gruys, Parker is an avid follower of aurora predictions. He recommends as the most digestible site for people who are just interested in when to head outside. The more technical stuff can be found on .
Jasper also has its own site, created by Gruys, for all things dark skies. That can be found at .
To see Gottardo’s time lapse video, visit .
