Two nights ago something quite unbelievable happened over Lancashire, in fact all across the UK and into Europe and beyond. The Aurora Borealis put on a show. And it wasn’t just any show, it was a performance of epic proportions that gave and gave and gave some more, before going in to several encores while its enraptured audience looked on in wonder…
This year has seen frequent solar storms that have led to my aurora app delivering red alerts, but normally they arrive while it’s still light outside and then tail off when the skies darken. Moreover, I’ve been to the Arctic Circle seven times to date and only ever seen them fleetingly there on the odd occasion, and certainly not when I was in a position to photograph them. So I’d had rather a strained relationship with the elusive Northern Lights for many years. But not anymore.
I already had a composition in mind that involved some old gates – easy to drive to and hopefully not too busy. This weekend the forecast was very high following some extreme solar storms where the sun had injected a huge coronal mass. Apparently it was the maximal chance to see, and having taken a chance on my luck I parked up next to just one camper van and walked five minutes out in to the fields to set myself up. It was 10pm – dark, but still too early.
Over the course of the next 45 minutes or so I watched the darkness deepen, but there was nothing dancing around the sky to the north or showing up on camera. I was just about to give it up as another bad job when I looked to the east and saw some faint patches of something that might have been moving around. And it wasn’t the various cars driving past, or walkers on the opposite fellside. No, this was something in the sky…
I recomposed my camera, refocused on the gates and took a shot in the dark, the result – eight seconds later – confirming my suspicions:
A couple of shots later and the aurora seemed to be on the wane – there’s no predictability about if and when and for how long these things will last, and to be honest I was already made up that I’d managed a decent attempt at a picture of them. If nothing else came, I had one good shot in the bag. But then something else happened. Some pink started to appear…
And then some orange, at which point I just sat back in the grass and watched as Mother Nature pulled out all of the stops, capturing each colour transition as it came.
By this time it was gone 11.30pm. I’d been watching for about 45 minutes, but at what point do you leave when all this is going on around you? As the colours all merged in to purple and the display appeared to lull I decided to call it a night and head home, unusually passing a fair few parked up cars on the remote roads round Calder Vale, their occupants standing in fields and hedges looking out west towards the sea.
Yes, the west. By this point the aurora were arching right overhead, and when I got home they were even dancing over the top of my house. It was an incredible sight to behold, and after all these years of trying, it was right on my own doorstep – quite literally in the end – that I finally managed it.
Over the course of the next 24 hours the internet was absolutely awash with peoples’ pictures across the land. There was a suggestion of a repeat performance last night – along with tales of gridlocked traffic making nighttime trips out to known local secluded beauty spots, which I suspected would be the case. I took a walk out for another attempt myself even closer to home – but it wasn’t to be. The show was over once more.
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Glen