About
My name is Stepan — Step to those who know me. And this is my aurora guide.
I've been drawn to the north for as long as I can remember. Every winter my family and I would head somewhere cold and beautiful — skiing, snowshoeing, hiking. For years we spent weeks in the north and never once saw the northern lights. I would check the sky on clear nights, hoping, but nothing came.
That changed when I discovered how aurora forecasts actually work. In January 2018, armed with my daughter's old DSLR and a stepladder for a tripod, I captured my first aurora photograph. That night changed everything. The dance of the lights, the silence, the stars, the snow-covered landscape — I was completely hooked.
My first aurora photo. 9 January 2018, 1:20 am.
What followed was years of learning, experimenting, and exploring. Camera settings, gear, forecasts, composition, location scouting — each problem solved revealed the next one. But somewhere along the way the technical questions became less interesting than the bigger one: where do you find a landscape worthy of the aurora above it?
That's what drives me now. I'm a passionate aurora photographer who explores and shares locations worth photographing under the northern lights. The aurora itself is remarkable — but it's the moment when you're standing in an iconic or completely unknown place, the lights appear overhead, and everything comes together. That wow moment. That's what I want to experience, remember, and share.
To optimise my own planning and increase my chances of being in the right place at the right time, I built the Step's Aurora Guide app — combining all the forecasts I need in one place. And this website is where I share everything I've learned and found along the way — for those who want to plan their own trip and experience those moments themselves.