After an evening of trick-or-treating in Maplewood, Minnesota, on October 31, 2003, 4-year-old Vincent Ledvina and his family were heading home for the night. Suddenly, he noticed the sky was lit up in ethereal colors that were like nothing he had ever seen before. To Ledvina, as a child, it looked like flames rippling across the sky.
When he got to his house, he watched the lights from a west-facing window. “I was kind of fascinated but also just kind of mystified. I had no idea what was going on,” he says.
He stared outside, taking in the glow, until his parents made him go to bed. “I was just totally transfixed by it.” The next day, Ledvina learned he’d seen a rare geomagnetic storm, now known as the , that brought the northern lights much farther south than usual.
That experience launched an interest in the night sky, which morphed into an obsession with the northern lights. Now, studies space physics in a doctoral program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He’s hooked on chasing auroras, going out to look on every clear night that he can.
“The addiction is real,” says , an astronomer and professional aurora chaser based in the United Kingdom and United States. He’s seen auroras more than 300 times—he’s gazed upon their light during the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, taught travelers on Norway’s Hurtigruten cruise lines as the company’s chief aurora scientist and even accidentally plunged his foot through the ice on a frozen stream while.