Experiencing Aurora
The Northern Dawn Winds
What an amazing night. Friday 10th May saw a major Aurora Borealis display bring awe and delight, visible from all of the UK and lower latitudes around the world. It was a privilege to have experienced such a display. What follows are my notes writen (in journalling form) on the morning after with only light editing.
Ten Fifteen pm and the AuroraWatch app forecast shoots up and beyond 1000 mT - a real red alert. Time to go out and look, grabbed woolly hats, and jackets and headed up to our local fell - Beacon Fell - that has a good northern sky aspect to and over the Bowland Fells.
Yet as expected the north side of Fell Road was busy, with every parking place taken, even non-parking places taken. We used a car park into the forest to the quarry and walked through the tracks back to the north side road using red light headlamps to help acquire night vision. However, night vision was difficult to maintain, constantly affected by the headlamps of cars arriving along the north side of the fell. Finding a good dark place, we waited and chatted with others,
As it turned out, when the Northern Lights did ramp up later, it was not a clear northern sky that was so important as the lights were directly overhead, even to the southern sky. There was something of a festival feeling waiting for performance chating and an occasional ooo-ing of shooting stars (tail from Hayley?) passing over Fairsnape and the Bowland Fells.
Early images of the night sky through the iPhone lens didn’t show too much colour or curtains. Was anything happening? Was that cloud, mist or the beginning of aurora borealis?
But come ten past eleven, there is a redness, then pinkness, mauve then purple, blue, green ... a full spectrum of lights overhead and towards the southern sky.
Bows. Curtains. Veils. Ribbons. Skybirds and Firebirds. Angels. Such wonderful words are used and heard as descriptions of a mesmerising changing fluid pattern.
It seemed everyone was taking images, videoing, and no doubt sharing. Such wonderful images will fill galleries on most phones this evening. The colours on phones were far better than the naked eye but setting this phone aside eyes were able to determine the same bold colours. Not looking through the lens, increased the sense of what was happening, to take the moment to be present, to reflect on what we were witnessing and what that means today, in the past and for the future.
Certainly aware that we were in a very special moment and particularly where we were, here in northern England. But maybe it has previously been the case to see the Aurora from here in the past through the ages. Having science today to explain what was happening has maybe divorced us from the place, of history and how these lights were seen and understood in the past. Was there a sense of kinship with the spirits in the night sky we cannot fathom or understand today?
There’s a whole range of descriptions, current, indigenous and regional descriptors such as the Merry Dancers (Scottish) Fox Trails (Finland) dance of the wins (Foroes) soul paths (Basque) movement to ancestral spirits, spirits playing ball games, dancing maidens, travelling with the spirits (Inuit) spirits ancestors weaving baskets (Alaska) night winds and purple Dawn (China) lights guiding spirits to the afterlife. Dancing.
There is a collective feeling of being connected. Of sharing with awe and wonderment, sharing images from around the UK and beyond, a sense of coming together. Was there an electro-magnetic connection? This one night of aurora delight could be doing more than good for our wellbeing and feeling good spirits. Yet at the same time feeling small and insignificant in the scale of things of the cosmic level of the Aurora.
The Aurora was just as bright as we returned into our village a few hours later. Here on our village green, a cross topped with a Carolean soldier has stood here since 1675, possibly earlier.
Sat on the steps to the cross gave me time and space for reflection and questions. When was the last time something of this magnitude was seen here? Within the last hundred years, maybe? never? (Apparently, a storm of tonight’s magnitude was last seen in the UK in the 1930s). When our cross was erected, how would the 1600 constructors have reacted to such a show, how would they have made their own understanding? Although they may well have been aware of the term Aura Borealis - it was first used by the Roman, Pliny the Elder, to describe the dawn light of the northern winds.
And then, sat outside, writing these notes early the following morning the magical lights of the night before do seem rather dreamlike - did it really happen as vividly as memory (and the images) suggest? I feel so privileged to have witnessed here in our home location, our place, yet with a common excitement as images were being shared from across most of the UK and beyond.
And then pulled back to earth noticing and mesmerised by garden mosses. Beautiful green moss with dew droplets, opening, moving and responding to moisture.
Within some eight hours an awesome juxtaposition of nature, of the dream-like fluidity of the cosmic macro of the universe, alongside the detailed micro delicacy in a moss.