(somber instrumental music) - I've always been immensely curious about everything: the trees, the plants.

How do things survive here?

How do you get through the cold weather?

There's a minutia in the landscape here.

First time I saw the aurora, I remember my folks telling me to go outside and look off to the north from the home there about 7 miles east of Pullman, Washington.

It was just a glow.

There was nothing distinctive about it.

That's one of the main differences that caught me and kept me here in Alaska.

I've been here for 54 years now.

I have no interest in leaving.

I still am fascinated.

One thing that you pretty much think as soon as you're around and live here a while is that anybody that can live here and survive is pretty tough stuff!

Coldest I've ever been is 75 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.

You feel it right away.

(laughs) I came to Alaska thinking I was only going to stay here 3 or 4 years.

To my amazement, I ended up with a very high level aerospace job being the director of Poker Flat Research Range.

I wasn't all that enamored of it at the time, but I did get data that no one had ever gotten before.

Now I spent years at Poker Flat Research Range where we worked all night, every night, trying to launch rockets to study the auroras.

- (Announcer) One, zero.

- (Neal) So we became the expert and the people to go to when you're trying to build a camera to study the aurora.

It was horribly complicated.

Umpteen knobs all to be twisted this way and that with gigantic cables leading off to recorders all over the place.

A lot of instructions to follow, couple, three hours to get it set up, the color balance being the most critical.

It was just amazing.

It was a very temperamental camera, but the imagery out of it was astounding.

Now I have a $2,000 Sony A7S I love to go out and look up at the night sky.

I usually do it down in front of the house.

I'm all prepared the night before.

I never have to stumble around because I leave the camera set up that way.

It's just something that I've done all my life.

(ethereal instrumental music) When I look up into the sky and see the aurora, I stop and sort of go quiet.

I don't really think too much about the technology behind it or what causes it.

It seems like there's almost a spiritual element sweeping it around in the sky.

Every time you see it, it induces kind of that feeling that you're seeing something spiritual worth stopping and watching, listening.

You walk out in the evening and the sky's completely clear, and you see all the stars, and moments later the sky is completely covered with moving light, colored light, fast motions.

It's just always kind of like a silent symphony of color.

I give many talks to people about the aurora.

I tell them how to photograph it, I tell them what's going on.

Many times I say, “Don't even worry about it.

"Just go out and look at it.” (laughs) I've lived in Alaska for 54 years.

I still feel like a newcomer at times, in that there's more to learn about what it's like to live here.

I didn't realize how curious I was about everything until I came to Alaska.

(drone beeps) (Neal chuckles) This is such good fun, I tell you.

(ethereal instrumental music)