Note: Full tutorial with images is here.

We often talk about the altitudes of aurora colors, but it can feel difficult to get a sense for just how high up the Northern and Southern Lights shine. Sometimes they seem to glow at vast distances high up in the sky, and sometimes they feel close, almost within reach. While we discuss auroral altitudes from a Western science perspective in this post, we recognize that there are many other ways of knowing around the world that approach and build relationships with this aspect of the aurora.

At Aurorasaurus, we are in the midst of NASA’s Heliophysics Big Year, celebrating May’s theme of Visual Art, which includes crafting and fiber arts. The timing is great for our aurora australis friends, too! In this post, we’ll walk you through a simple, beginner-level pattern to make your own aurora winter hat (also called a beanie or toque). This is one way to take part in the Heliophysics Big Year, keep warm while aurora chasing, and have a tactile way to get a feel for the height of the aurora. Get ready to make your next aurora chase in style!

This pattern can be created using any row-based fiber art. While we are using a 48-stitch hand-cranked knitting machine for our example, you can knit or crochet the hat by hand, or use other techniques. For the sake of consistency, in this post we will use the word “knit.”

For an adult hat, you will need:

• 48-needle knitting machine
• Yarn or tapestry needle for finishing the hat
• Dark blue yarn
• Pink yarn
• Green yarn
• Red yarn
• Optional: stitch counters if hand knitting or crocheting, to help keep track of the number of rows.

Some notes on yarn: For our example, we used worsted weight yarn (a measure of thickness, also called Aran, medium, or 10 ply.) Gauge is 3 stitches/inch. Amounts of yarn will vary, but as an example, we used about 95 yards of blue, plus about 1 ⅔ yards of pink, 17 yards of green, and 50 yards of red. In addition, it can be difficult to color match red, green, and pink yarn. We took a bit of artistic license and used colors with blue undertones: cranberry, teal, and berry. If you want to take the aesthetic side even further, you could use sparkly or glow in the dark yarn to represent the aurora’s shimmer!