Setting the bar: Why a Canadian aurora chaser proposed under the northern lights

What is it about proposals, weddings and wild weather that go together? There was Rhode Island couple Adam and Sally Irujo, who tied the knot in the midst of a blizzard that ultimately dropped 19 inches of snow in January 2022. And just a month ago, Scott and Michelle Ellermet, who both lost their longtime spouses, married along the beach in North Carolina, with a poetic double rainbow arching across the sky in the background.

Needless to say, Mother Nature has sometimes played a leading role in Cupid’s alchemy, leading to great viral moments embraced by people around the world. But last week, Manitoba, Canada’s Justin Anderson might’ve topped them all by proposing to his girlfriend, Jenn Sutherland, under the northern lights. A digital creator and aurora chaser, Anderson has an Instagram page with over 25,000 followers and hundreds of videos and photos of these majestic natural light displays in the sky.

Anderson spoke to AccuWeather about his lifelong passion, how he orchestrated the proposal, and if he can ever top this viral proposal down the line.

The setup

Born and raised in Manitoba, Anderson has been taking photos of auroras for years. In 2019, there was a huge northern lights event that got him hooked and he took his passion to the next level. “We get really good northern lights here in Manitoba – like every second or third night,” Anderson said. “I remember going to bed that night going, ‘I never want to miss a show like that.’”

At a latitude of about 50 degrees north or more depending on where you are in the state, Manitoba is just the kind of high-latitude region that is perfect for aurora sightings. Commonly called northern lights or southern lights, auroras are the result of disturbances in the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by the solar wind. The term aurora borealis was coined by Galileo in the 1600s after the Roman Aurora, goddess of the dawn, and the Greek Boreas, god of the north wind. Auroras are visible at the poles because Earth’s magnetic field is weakest there, which allows the solar wind to interact with the atmosphere.

Anderson now runs Manitoba Aurora and Astronomy, which has over 70,000 members on Facebook, and works with NASA’s Aurorasaurus, where he helps with social outreach and predicting these events.

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He first met his now-fiancee Sutherland on TikTok, and in those early conversations, she expressed a passion for the night sky. He offered to show her the northern lights on an early date, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A proposal to remember

But how did this shared passion turn into a huge surprise proposal? Anderson has always wanted to propose under the northern lights. “Since day one, I’ve always known that was going to be the thing,” Anderson said. “But I didn’t really anticipate it to blow up like it did.”

Prior to the big day, Anderson custom-made and designed the ring, which has three gems underneath the main band that are green, blue, and purple, just like the northern lights. He also purchased a ring box with a light.

With the ring made and everything ready, it then became a matter of when the stars would align, pun intended. Luckily, on the morning of Oct. 10, he saw the aurora data trending in the right direction and decided this was the day to make his move, especially before the cold Canadian winters began. “I also wanted to get it done before we have to be oompa loompas underneath the night sky in huge snowsuits,” he said.

Oct. 10 also happened to be three years to the day when Anderson and Sutherland first met.

Orchestrated entirely by Anderson, he told Sutherland that he wanted to take a drive so they could get a new selfie of them with perfect lighting. A 35-minute drive from where they live, Anderson was afraid she would catch wind of his plan. But she never did.

The event was a G4 aurora event, out of a maximum G5, which meant that the auroras could be visible for much of the mid-latitudes from that Thursday night through morning. For these spectacular shots, he used a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV as well as a Sony camera that specializes in capturing low-light video. It went off without a hitch and, perhaps more importantly, she said yes!