Dark Nights & Bright Lights 🟢✨
Keeping The Streak 🔥🧭🧠
For the first time in 47 weeks, I missed publishing a Recalibrating newsletter last weekend. To be fair, I was in the mountains with no service after a week of exploring 🤷♂️
The whole point of the Recalibrating philosophy is to embrace the ever-changing nature of reality and go with the flow. Rather than stress about trying to keep my publishing streak going, I decided to take the time to experience the moment and enjoy the beauty of the Canadian Rockies.
That said, I also value using this newsletter as counter, tracking the weeks since I quit my job, so I want to keep the counter going.
I thought I would put out a brief entry today with some reflections from the Rockies before writing the next full newsletter.
My time in the Rockies has been incredible, with some of the most mind-blowing sights I’ve ever seen 🤯
What are the odds that the greatest solar storm since 2003 happened to hit the northern hemisphere at the same time I was in one of the darkest places in the world?
Note: all photos in this entry are unedited; stay tuned for the edits and timelapes (I will share more on YouTube, Instagram, and Farcaster) ✨
If you would like to learn more about Farcaster (the future of social media) please check out this article here.
Recalibrating Recap
Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)
Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨
Last entry, I touched on the updates to Instagram (favouring smaller creators rather than aggregators) and how blockchain provides a way to verify “posts” across different platforms.
This week, I’m going to keep things short and share a few thoughts from my time in the Rockies (along with a few unedited photos, processed images coming soon 👀)
Disconnect to Reconnect 🫥 😌
One of my favourite aspects of going into the mountains is how often I lose service.
As much as I strive to stay present in life, it can be so easy for me to get distracted by any number of things. Social media, email, tv, the news… there is no end to distraction.
But in the mountains… time seems to slow. Issues that seemed so important only a few hours earlier fade to the back of my mind before being silenced entirely.
There is a calm to the mountains that is unlike anywhere else I’ve been (though the desert is close).
I think part of this peace comes from the sense of scale that naturally arises from being in the mountains. Lakes, trees, hills, buildings, roads, wildlife, people… they all pale in comparison to the sheer size of the mountains in the distance.
Mountains provide a shift in perspective.
Incidentally, “a shift in perspective” was almost the name of this newsletter and is a theme I find myself returning to regularly.
Shifting my perspective helps to recalibrate my sense of self. Rather than being distracted by the unending connection to the Internet and the hustle culture of city life, I can disconnect from it all, and just be 😌.
This separation from normal life helps to shift my perspective and reconnect with myself, providing me with a sense of clarity and awareness.
By reflecting on this shifted perspective, both while I am still in the mountains and when I return home, I find I am better able to hold onto this clarity and extend it into ordinary life, prolonging its impact on my life.
Knocking myself out of ordinary routine and habits helps identify what works and what doesn’t work in everyday life, giving me data I can use to recalibrate my life and self.
The Darkest Nights
Another reason I love being in the mountains is that mountains often are less travelled and less habituated compared to other regions where major cities reside.
The Rockies are full of dark areas, pockets of darkness the light pollution of cities doesn’t reach. If you’re interested in learning more, you can read about the Bortle scale here (how dark a region is).
Dark skies are becoming much, much harder to find in modern life. As an astrophotographer, this saddens me greatly, since I am unable to shoot the stars. As a human, it makes me concerned for the potentially negative psychological impact a lack of stars has on the world.
I went into the Rockies because one of my friends was getting married in Jasper, a beautiful location north of Banff.
Jasper, Canada is actually a dark sky preserve, meaning it is an area where lights use is regulated. The town itself still has some light pollution of course, but it is drastically reduced compared to other towns.
You can see the difference between Jasper and Toronto below, with the light pollution map at the same scale.
The last time I was in Jasper (in 2020) I was pumped to see the Milky Way and try my hand at some timelapses. Unfortunately, I was completely clouded out each night. At the time, I was quite sad. I was in one of the darkest places in the world, and I wasn’t even able to see the stars.
This time, I knew I would be unable to see the Milky Way since it didn’t rise until 3 am.
I thought about leaving my camera out overnight, which I sometimes do depending on the weather and theft risk, but when I went to go scope out a potential location, I literally almost walked into an Elk.
I hadn’t factored in the wildlife risk and given the number of Elk in the campground and the fact that there were grizzly bear sightings that day, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my camera out where an animal could potentially break it or I could get attacked when going to retrieve it.
All that to say, I thought that the best shots I would get this trip would be of a few stars, perhaps constellations.
Little did I know…
The Brightest Lights
After spending the day without service at Maligne Lake, hiking through the snow and coming across a lot of wildlife (elk, deer, moose, bald eagle, big-horn sheep, Harlequin Ducks, Columbian ground squirrels) it was time to head back to the campsite.
When I got back into service, I had a message from my friend saying “did you see this?”.
“This” was an article on how the Earth was about to get hit by the most intense solar storm since 2003, drastically increasing the likelihood of seeing the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights).
I had heard news like this before, potential northern lights sightings in Ontario, but the lights never appeared. Accordingly, I kept my expectations low, especially given the amount of clouds that day. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
Thankfully, this time, the news was right 👀 Thanks for the heads up Sébastien 🫡
The biggest solar storm of the millennia was here and the clouds had cleared away just in time.
My First Aurora Borealis
A few of my high school friends were in town for the wedding, so we decided to go back to the campground and have a fire while we waited to see if the solar storm would hit.
After the sun set and the Earth’s shadow darkened the night sky, I began scanning the blue hour sky for signs of the aurora. I knew that while the afterglow of sunset was still present, they would likely be quite faint, perhaps appearing like dull clouds.
Around 11 pm, I looked up again and noticed a strange wisp on the horizon. My heart began to hammer. This was it.
As my excitement grew, I pulled out my phone to take a quick long exposure, guessing that the wisp would be more colourful on my phone than with my eyes. My eyes expose at ~1/50 seconds, whereas my phone was exposing at 3 seconds (150 times more light).
The photo turned out bright green.
The Aurora was here 🟢
Everyone around the fire jumped up and began looking into the night, taking photos and exploring the night sky for more signs of the Northern Lights.
After a few more minutes, the sky increasingly filled with more and more wisps, darkening in green colour as the night sky turned blacker.
Shockingly, the colours were not limited to green. The sky literally looked as if it was exploding, cracks appearing directly above and fracturing into prisms of light and colour.
Red, pink, blue, violet, green; almost an entire rainbow of colour dancing above our heads.
My mind was blown 🤯
The only time I had experienced this much awe was with the Milky Way under the Madagascar night sky.
Everywhere I looked, the sky filled with more and more of the Aurora.
Sharing The Moment With Friends
I spent the next 2 hours continuing to explore the night sky with my friends, looking for more bursts of colour lighting up the darkness.
It was an incredibly special experience, not only witnessing my first Aurora Borealis show, but sharing the moment with my friends, all in town celebrating the wedding of our high school friend.
What are the odds that one of the most spectacular natural light shows of my lifetime just so happened to align with our time in one of the darkest regions of Canada 🤯
What a special experience 😌
We spent the time chatting and comparing photos, taking in the awe and admiring the beauty of nature.
Everywhere I looked, the night got more beautiful and magical, the ethereal multi-coloured light casting rainbows across the mountains, fields, and friends.
We were in the Whistlers campground, one of the most open, panoramic campgrounds I’ve ever been in, giving us a 360 degree view of the Aurora. Thankfully, we were able to sit around the fire to keep warm, while also casting a warm, flickering light across the vehicles and people as we looked up into the night and across the mountains.
Disconnecting from the hustle of everyday life to spend time in nature with friends, witnessing the most impressive natural phenomenon known to humankind… it’s hard to put into words how special this experience was to me.
Astro & Inspiration
Watching this solar storm hit the Earth in the form of the Aurora Borealis was one of the most magical astro experiences of my life, including witnessing the total solar eclipse just a few short weeks ago.
It’s amazing how much astro events have an impact on my inspiration.
Inspiration to travel the world and experience the magic of nature.
Inspiration to get away from everyday life to find and recalibrate myself.
Inspiration to share these experiences with loved ones, making stories together.
It’s wild to think that it’s been almost one year since I left my job, recalibrating the trajectory of my life to align more with the path I knew I was meant to walk.
I leave the mountains feeling more inspired than ever to continue building this new life for myself, a life of exploration, adventure, art, and awe.
I can’t wait to go through the footage and edit the many, many timelapses I took of the Aurora and mountains, let alone the wildlife videos 👀
Next/This Week
I have a few ideas on what to write about this upcoming week (probably this weekend so I can stay on track with my counter).
I might write more about this experience in the mountains, sharing more photos and memories.
I might write about the update to ChatGPT-4o (4 omni), which looks wild.
I might write more about the updates to the creator economy we’re seeing, continuing the conversation from last week.
If you’re interested in anything in particular, or have any questions, please let me know 🫡
Stay tuned ✨
P.S. If you are interested in supporting my journey as a creator, please consider subscribing to the paid portion of Substack or my Hypersub (web3 patreon). Your support means a lot ✨
