If I were to tally up the hours I’ve spent trying to find the aurora borealis, they would likely add up to weeks.

Searching for them is like trying to bake cookies with a pantry some invisible entity stocks at random. The recipe calls for just three ingredients: Geomagnetic activity powerful enough for the human eye (or my camera’s image sensor) to detect, a clear sky and a time of year where the sun really, truly sets and it gets really, truly dark outside. Sounds easy enough, right?

Anywhere else it would be. But I live in a rainforest, and it’s rare to have a clear sky in stock. During the summers, the sky is a deep, velvety blue on cloudless nights — while it’s one of my favorite colors, it’s not conducive to spotting Lady A. The final ingredient in this seemingly simple recipe is a

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