SASKATOONEXPRESS - November 2-8, 2015 - Page 1
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1702 8th St. & Louise | 3330 8th St. E. | 705 22nd St. W. | 1204 Central Ave. | 802 Circle Dr. E. | 519 Nelson Road. Volume 12, Issue 44, Week of November 2, 2015
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
The Aurora Hunter Saskatoon photographer shares love of Northern Lights
An American couple standing outside St Paul’s Evangelical Luther Church in Bergheim received an anniversary photo of a lifetime from Colin Chatfield Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express here are few among us that appreciate the Land of the Living Skies more than Colin Chatfield. The Saskatoon photographer has approximately 30,000 photos of the Northern Lights to prove it. Chatfield has become so well known for his incredible night shots that he is known as the Aurora Hunter. It’s not a surprise. Chatfield has long had an interest in the goings-on above us. “My dad got me basically into astronomy when I was a kid,” he said. “He always had telescopes so I learned about some of the sky then, but not so much the Northern Lights. I don’t remember seeing them much when I was a kid, but I guess I wasn’t really looking for it. But he got me into knowing the constellations, the Milky
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Way and various sky objects. I remember hand drawing star charts as a kid from books that he had, sitting at the kitchen table doing that.” He lost sight of the skies for a period. Five or so years ago, he looked up again. After dabbling with the moon and Jupiter and things such as the Andromeda Galaxy, he discovered the Northern Lights. The first night out, he took a photo that went viral. “It got picked up by space.com, Yahoo News, ABC News in the States. A Phoenix news station picked it up and it got printed in a British magazine. It was my first real Northern Lights picture. “It was pretty cool, actually. I never expected anything like that. That is certainly not why I was doing it; I was doing it because I enjoyed it.” Chatfield said he didn’t promote the
photo. He simply posted it in a couple of places on Facebook. “And that was it. And it got picked up from there. Once space.com picked it up, it exploded from there.” He said its colours must have caught the attention of those who saw it. “It had blue and orange and green and red. That was really it. I didn’t even think it was that special. To this day I think, ‘Well, I’ve done a lot better ones than that.’ ” About a year ago, Chatfield decided to more formally share his passion with like-minded people. He started a Facebook group — Saskatchewan Aurora Hunters. Chatfield started with Bob Johnson, the friend who took him out on the night he got the photo that went viral. He then added 20 more people he knew. (Continued on page 5)
Colin Chatfield