Awe (rora) struck!

The most amazing colours were streaking across the sky.

Vivid reds, pale greens, pink tints…

All interspersed with dynamic streaks of light as the charged particles interacted with the Earth’s atmosphere to create the most spectacular light show, here, in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, UK.

Not Norway or Iceland, but the north west of England.

I, like many others here in the UK, saw the Aurora Borealis last Thursday evening for the first time in my life. The Sun’s activity was very high last week in part because the Sun is getting close to the most active period in its 11 year cycle. This meant the geomagnetic storm that caused the light show to reach as far south as East Sussex, whilst unusual, was not unexpected.

After 5-10 minutes things started to hot up and you could see the colours and streaks above with the naked eye. Jupiter is photobombing here just above the house.

The incredible light show that many of us witnessed on Thursday 10th October, was caused by what is termed a cannibal Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). This is where charged particles from two or more CME events combine on their way to the Earth. This led to an extreme geomagnetic storm similar in strength to the one many people (but sadly not me) witnessed back in May. These storms, which are classed as G5 (on the G-Scale by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) are very rare; the last of them to hit our planet before May was back in 2003.

So this was a big deal.

And it felt it.

When you see a storm like this you just have to wake the kids…

I’d been scrolling through Facebook just a few minutes earlier, when I saw that one of my friends had posted Aurora photos. A quick check of the AuroraWatch UK website revealed that this was no ordinary geomagnetic storm. In fact on a scale of 1 to ‘get the kids out of bed’, this was definitely in the latter category, so I grabbed my coat, and headed out into the garden.

At first I was disappointed not to see anything resembling the photo I’d seen on the internet. But as my eyes adapted I could gradually make out some light green hues to the north, then a slightly orangy/red band to the east. To the south it was clearly a more normal navy blue sky. Scanning the sky in this way made the aurora more obvious to me during those initial minutes while my vision adapted to the night sky.

I held my phone up as advised by multiple people, and could see some streaks through it and a more obvious auroral glow, so quickly snapped a few photos.

Initially I was disappointed as I could barely see anything with my own eyes, my phone camera revealing this auroral glow.

However things then quickly developed. The storm got more intense, the colours were emboldened and very soon I needed no phone to see the striking display. Kaz and I stood in the garden for around 30 minutes watching the display, pointing at the streaks as they appeared and changed, and chatting with our neighbour over the fence.

We went indoors after the initial display, but there was an even stronger showing after midnight. However, I was just grateful to have witnessed a single apparition of this phenomena with my own eyes, and amazingly from my own back yard.

It left me with an indelible impression of where we really are.

We’re on a ball of rock, hurtling through space, being protected by a magnetic field generated by our planet’s core. We’re relatively safe here on Earth. We would do well to remember that.