I’ve wanted to see the northern lights ever since I was a little girl. I love star-gazing and looking into the night sky and have various apps on my phone to help identify constellations and keep track of meteor shower dates and aurora activity levels. There have been a few times when I’ve had alerts to say that aurora activity levels were high, but we live a bit too far south for me to have had any real hope that I’d get to see them without a taking trip to Iceland or Finland and hoping to be lucky.
You can imagine my excitement on Friday evening when I saw an alert about high aurora activity levels and saw this aurora map with the auroral ovation further south than I’d ever seen it before. The app was predicting a 25% probability of seeing the aurora in our area. The best I’d ever seen previously was around 5%. The huge spike in geomagnetic activity levels showing on the app was due to a huge solar storm.
Auroras are caused by electrically charged particles from solar storms being captured in Earth’s magnetic field and colliding with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere. The different colours seen are caused by the particles interacting with different molecules at different altitudes. Reds and greens are caused by interactions with oxygen at high and low altitudes, and purples and blues are caused by interactions with nitrogens.
Once it got dark, we got the kids into the car and headed out of for a drive into the Chilterns to find a good spot away from light pollution. I wasn’t sure we’d get to see anything at all. At best I thought we might be able to pick up something through photos, and maybe see a very faint glow with the naked eye if we were really lucky.
We didn’t see anything in the sky at first, but I was so excited when the first photos captured a purple and green glow.
As it got darker, the colours on the photos became more vibrant. The aurora was now visible to the naked eye – just white streaks at first but gradually we could see pinks, purples and greens too.
It was amazing to see the aurora all around us – looking up was like being under a canopy of pale coloured, glowing light. I never thought for one minute that we’d get to see it so clearly. It was magical. My sister described it as God’s paintbrush across the sky which was a beautiful description.
Thomas had fallen asleep in the car but Sophie was entranced by getting to see the aurora. I did consider waking Thomas but I think he would have been too sleepy to really take it in.
It was a very late night for us all (we didn’t get home until 1am) but definitely worth staying up for!
So many people ticked seeing the Northern Lights off their bucket list over the weekend. I totally missed them on Friday evening and it was too cloudy on Saturday.
How wonderful! Your photos are amazing! x
Your photos are amazing and I’m so glad you got to see the lights. I was disappointed as I couldn’t really get out anywhere, although I hear half of Birmingham were on the Lickey Hills which are not far from me and had a fairly decent view. I couldn’t see anything from my house because my neighbours were causing too much light pollution with party lights and house lights. I did love seeing all the photos though.