SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A pair of friends from Calgary said they were feeling quite frustrated having spent three days in the city without seeing the Northern lights. Colleen Traynor and Loral Stewart said they have looked high and low for the coveted light show but still haven't seen the aurora.

Loral Stewart and Colleen Traynor, both from Calgary, said they were feeling frustrated on Wednesday, having been in town three days without accomplishing their mission to view the Northern lights. The pair managed to spot the show for a short time that night. Cloudy nights have meant few opportunities to view the famous light show during peak aurora tourist season. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL photo

"We missed them on Monday night," Traynor said Wednesday, while sitting at the Northern Frontier Visitors Centre. "We were out until 12:30. We just went out on Frame Lake because we are going out on a tour (later in the week). This is really frustrating. It was fully clouded over but it depends where you're standing I guess. You need to be out of the lights of the city."

Stewart said she and Traynor took photography lessons before venturing North and learned to calibrate the settings of their cameras so as to allow them to capture the illusive lights. Stewart said she grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan and used to lay in the fields staring up at the aurora borealis.

Cloudy nights have meant few opportunities to view the display during the peak season for aurora tourists.

Tracy Therrien, general manager of the Northern Frontier Visitors Centre, said it has been unusually warm and cloudy this season which makes aurora viewing difficult. Despite the conditions, she said 90 per cent of their visitors are still managing to catch a glimpse of the lights. She said the centre encourages tourists not to give up, but there are no guarantees.

"It's like going on a whale watching tour and not seeing the whales," she said.

Last Sunday, Julius Iskandar said he and his partner had already spent five days in Yellowknife without seeing the display they travelled from Indonesia to see.

"We've been here five days and still haven't seen aurora," Iskandar said Sunday, while standing on the ice road to Dettah.

"So hopefully we will see some tonight."

Traynor said after three days with no results, the pair is pinning their hopes on planned snowmobile rides on Great Slave Lake - both tonight and Saturday.

In spite of their frustrations, Traynor said they've had a good time in the North.

"The people are friendly," she said. "We went to the government buildings and they were wonderful. I tell you, you've got it made."

The lights, which occur mostly near the polar regions, are caused when the planet's magnetosphere is disturbed by solar wind and magnetospheric plasma - in the form of protons and electrons - travelling upward toward space. According to the aurora forecast web page - run by the Astronomy North Society in Yellowknife - sky gazers can expect moderate light shows over the weekend, with unsettled periods during the nights and peak activity expected around midnight.

Yesterday morning, Traynor said the pair found what they were looking for Wednesday evening.

"We went out to the boat launch and they were quite mild but we did see them," she said. "It was a very short period of time and we really only had a 10-minute window."

The centre counts visitors coming through its doors, and keeps track of whether they're in town to see aurora or otherwise.

Therrien said the number of visitors walking through their doors this year has been higher than numbers counted in the same number of months last year. She said at the rate things are going the centre is on track to greet more than 40,000 visitors in 2016. Last year, there were 36,000, not including December visitors.

Representatives of North Star Adventures and Aurora Village did not respond to requests for comment before press time.

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