UAF PhD Student Vincent Ledvina Is the ‘The Aurora Guy’
By Zeke Shomler
Photos by Vincent Ledvina
On Halloween night, 2003, a young boy named Vincent Ledvina is walking home after a cold midwestern evening of trick-or-treating. He looks up and sees something bright and green shimmering across the sky. “Is that the aurora?” he asks his parents. They aren’t sure. But young Ledvina, having seen the wonders of the upper atmosphere with his own eyes for the first time, is hooked.
Now a second-year Ph.D. student in Space Physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ledvina studies the aurora borealis. He is working to understand the intricacies of these beautiful—and even life-changing—natural phenomena using both NASA and citizen-sourced data.
That 2003 aurora viewing, as he explained during an interview in September 2024, was the result of a relative maximum within a decades-long solar cycle that periodically extends the lights’ range and intensity. Now, twenty years later, we’re right in the midst of another several-year max. That means this winter, the northern lights are predicted to be brightening, ribboning, and dancing more than usual. For Ledvina, also known as “The Aurora Guy,” it means it’s the perfect time to work toward documenting the aurora and understanding the science behind them.
To be more precise, Ledvina’s PhD research takes a look at what are called “auroral beads.” These spots of auroral light appear like pearls on a string across the night sky, most often right before the onset of a period of high auroral activity. Grand auroral displays caused by “substorms,” or bursts of energy entering the upper atmosphere, are preceded by a brief but fascinating display of neat, beautiful dots across the sky.
As researchers have observed, auroral beads follow the Earth's magnetic field lines. They seem to be formed by small variations in plasma along Earth’s magnetic field, as the fourth state of matter interacting with energy from the Sun within Earth’s magnetic field creates “bubbles” of swirling particles—then, they rain down into our atmosphere “like surfers riding waves,” Ledvina explained.
But the exact nature of this phenomenon is not entirely known. It’s still up for discovery whether or not auroral beads, and the complex magnetic interactions driving them as we see them from the ground, directly cause the huge and beautiful light shows we usually see right after. It seems like they’re related somehow, but sometimes beads appear when there’s not a substorm. It's not known if the swirling ballooning motion is actually a necessary component of the whole substorm thing or just a unique feature in its own right.
When exactly do these beads occur? What’s the difference between the ones that happen right before a substorm and those that don’t? What other factors are involved, exactly? These are all open questions in the world of auroral physics right now.
A large part of Ledvina’s research involves analyzing videos of auroral beads and measuring things like wavelength, size, spacing, and growth rate. These data are then used to create models of these auroral beads, which can help explain what’s going on within the complex interactions of plasma, radiation, and magnetism in our upper atmosphere and in outer space.
With this work, funded by NASA grants and the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Ledvina is undertaking the largest-ever statistical study of auroral beads. In part, he’ll be using data sourced from NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms (THEMIS) mission. He’ll also be using data from videos and images sourced by aurora photographers from around the world—people contributing to what’s called “citizen science.”
Just by capturing photos of the northern lights, especially when they form a line of beads across the sky, any person with a camera (including a smartphone) can contribute to auroral science in a significant way. During our interview, Ledvina pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of the “auroral oval,” around the North Pole, where most of the auroral activity takes place. Most of the scientific sky cameras, he explained, are located within this ring across Canada, Alaska, Greenland and northern Europe.
But when a geomagnetic storm is really intense, the aurora tends to reach much further south. That’s what happened on Halloween 2003, which made the aurora so readily visible to the young Ledvina in Minnesota. It’s also what happened on May 10 of this year, the largest storm since then, when the lights could be seen across all of the United States.
And that’s exactly where citizen science comes in handy. There simply aren’t enough science cameras down at lower latitudes—places where the aurora is less likely to occur, but when they do, it’s because of a geomagnetic storm. Researchers, then, must look to ordinary people and their phones and cameras to understand what exactly is going on. Citizen-sourced data from lower latitudes are particularly useful for looking at auroral beads because of their connection to substorms. With his research, Ledvina is incorporating data from a platform called “Aurorasaurus,” which crowdsources sightings and photos of auroral phenomena. These aurora sightings, including observations of auroral beads, offer scientists like Ledvina a larger dataset to study.
With Aurorasaurus, either via the app or the website, contributors can upload photos and videos of their aurora sightings. Even if somebody doesn’t see the aurora, they can log that information to help round out the global picture. All the data is archived and made freely available to researchers to use and they take measures to make sure all their data is legit.
As Ledvina made sure to emphasize, citizen science can help make huge strides in Aurora research. The STEVE phenomenon, for example (an acronym for “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement”), which is a rare but distinctive pink-and-white light formation, was only recently formally described after renewed interest and documentation from aurora chasers uploading their photos to the internet and discussing their findings with scientists. As it turns out, you don’t need a physics degree to help make huge research breakthroughs.
While the physics behind the aurora is a source of love and fascination for Vincent, he also approaches it from another lens: photography. Though his research relies heavily on countless hours of scouring photos of auroral beads, auroral photography is more than just a data-collection exercise for him; it’s a true passion.
Vincent first obtained a camera when he was a preteen, a hand-me-down from his dad. At 15, he got his first “real” camera, focusing more intently on his love for taking shots of nature. Then, at 16, in Wisconsin, outside the light pollution of the Twin Cities, Vincent saw the aurora again and managed, barely, to capture a photo, reminding him of the awe he felt that Halloween night as a young child. He hasn’t looked back since.
Before coming to UAF, Ledvina earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of North Dakota (UND), where he helped found the North Dakota Dual Aurora Camera (NoDDAC) project to help fill the lower-latitude gap in aurora data. NoDDAC is an aurora webcam and camera platform that helps aurora chasers and scientists better observe rare mid-latitude auroral phenomena (like STEVE). He continued honing his own photography skills, chasing geomagnetic storms and clear skies to get the perfect shots.
“Aurora photography,” as Ledvina claims, “is the pinnacle of astrophotography.” So much has to come together for a good aurora photo—good weather, the right auroral activity, and just enough luck to capture the oft-elusive and ephemeral colored lights. While the aurora dances across the sky, one has to carefully adjust camera settings based on the variable light and intensity. It’s that extra layer of knowledge required, Vincent says, that makes it feel especially exciting when everything comes together for a great photo.
At UND, a university social media account shared one of Ledvina’s aurora photos along with some details about his NoDDAC research. When he went to an event later that day, somebody recognized his name, asking, “Hey, are you the aurora guy?” Vincent’s response was something along the lines of “I suppose so.”
And then it happened again—several times. He was officially The Aurora Guy of UND.
Ledvina has leaned into the “Aurora Guy” title in the few years since that night in North Dakota. On his website, theauroraguy.com, he posts photos and videos, educational materials, and webcam links. Site visitors can purchase his eBook aurora-chasing guides and his new “Awesome Auroras” 2025 calendar. His photography is also on display and available for purchase at Plum Bottom Gallery in Wisconsin. In some ways, this work is a business, but really, it’s a passion project. Above all, Ledvina simply hopes to make aurora-chasing more accessible to impassioned people like him.
As Ledvina explained, it’s not just about awe and beauty: aurora and the associated geomagnetic activity in the atmosphere have real, tangible effects on people’s lives. Since the aurora lights are a byproduct of energy currents in the atmosphere, they can have a profound impact on energy systems here on the ground. A severe geomagnetic event can cause blackouts by overloading transformers, interfering with GPS, and scrambling high-frequency radio communication.
These interruptions don’t just make Google Maps go haywire—they affect everything from air travel to oil drilling to farming. During the solar storm in May, for example, farmers in Manitoba had to stop planting because their GPS equipment was overloaded by geomagnetic energy. Sometimes, auroral activity causes flights over the Arctic to be rerouted, because the geomagnetic interruption takes over the communication systems. Radiation can also be higher closer to the poles and at flight altitudes. Trying to find the right signals against the intense radiation, Ledvina said, can be like “trying to hear a cricket next to a train.”
This also means there are huge implications for national defense involved in this research. It’s important to be able to rule out space weather as the cause of system disruptions since so much of our defense abilities rely on satellite data and GPS tracking. FEMA and other Emergency Management agencies pay careful attention to auroral activity because it can have such a profound effect on systems here on the ground. By helping us understand the causes and effects of these solar storms, Ledvina is contributing to these national safety efforts in a major way.
Even beyond his PhD research at UAF, Ledvina is heavily involved in space research elsewhere. Last summer, he interned at The Aerospace Corporation in California, where he helped work on more applied aurora research, like what happens to satellites when they fly through certain auroral structures. He’s also a member of the Auroral Research Coordination: Towards Internationalised Citizen Science (ARCTICS) working group with the International Space Science Institute, and recently joined the Space Weather Advisory Group, a committee that advises the White House on space weather matters, as their first student representative.
During this year’s active auroral season, he encourages people to get outside and try to catch a glimpse of these beautiful, swirling lights in the sky. Anyone who goes out to see them can report their sightings on Aurorasaurus and contribute to citizen-science research. Before taking photos and videos of the aurora, he explains, it’s important for photographers to make sure their cameras are set to the correct time, and that they can report their precise location. This helps make sure the data can be accurately compared to the bigger picture and correlated with the right measurements.
This aurora season, which may be the biggest in twenty years, has already kicked off. As the light fades and the nights get longer, it's worth looking up and trying to capture some of their wonder. Even knowing that there’s more to learn is a source of inspiration; anyone can look up and feel the magical force of the solar system, knowing that there are still mysteries to be unlocked. With Ledvina’s advice, keep looking up at the night sky.
