Denali Aurora

Chasing the northern lights is mostly driving. You watch the forecast, pick a direction away from town, and drive until the sky decides. Most nights it never does. This one did, about forty miles out, over an empty stretch of Alaskan highway.
The corona opened directly overhead, which only happens when you are standing under the middle of the aurora oval instead of looking north at it from far below. Green ribbons came down from the top of the sky in every direction at once, bright enough to read the road by, with the spruce standing black underneath.
I set the camera low on the centerline and let the guardrails run out ahead, so the road pulls you into the frame the way it pulled me down it. Wide, and only a few seconds long. Any more than that and the ribbons smear into a flat wash and you lose the structure that made me stop the car in the first place.
For anyone who has driven into the dark on a forecast and a hunch. Printed and finished to gallery standard, made to hold that green against a dark wall. A piece of an Alaskan night to keep, from the one road where the sky did everything at once.