Notes from NE Lincs

Like most of the country, I spent the night of 10 May 2024 through to the early hours of 11 May 2024 staring up in awe, camera in hand, as the Northern Lights put on one of the most dazzling displays this country has ever seen. But my relationship with the Aurora Borealis didn’t start there.

I was seven, maybe eight years old. I am going to go out on a limb and say it was the Great Solar Storm of 13 March 1989 (although I can’t be 100% certain). That particular storm peaked at 2145 UTC, so I would have been long in bed by that point.

The following morning’s routine would have involved supposedly getting ready for school but instead watching whichever cartoon TV:AM used to sandwich in between their news bulletins and features (invariably this was Huckleberry Hound or Hong Kong Phooey). But on this morning, something on the news headlines caught my attention.

Reports of a great show of the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis across much of England. This was only usually visible in the very northern reaches of Scotland, sometimes gracing us in Northern England, but very rarely across the entire British Isles. I knew about the Aurora Borealis. I had read about in school books and encyclopaedias. If those were to be believed, this was the greatest celestial show of them all. I had to see it.

So I set myself a challenge. I would see it. From my hometown. To see it from Scandanavia or inside the Arctic Circle would be too easy. I was going to see the Northern Lights from jolly old Cleethorpes. And then for pretty much 35 years I did very little about it but kept reiterating this bucket list moment to myself.

The fleeting glimpse outside on a clear night, gazing towards the Northern skies; ‘wonder if I will see them tonight?’ or squinting at the twilight going ‘Is that them?’ – without actually putting much effort into the matter. It was almost a case of if it happens, you will hear about it or be in a position where you can’t miss it.

But then things changed when we had children. As I touched on in this post about Halley’s Comet, they like space, so I rekindled my interest in the subject. But, instead of perusing books and heading to the library when I needed to find something out, we now have the power of social media. And this is where social media comes into its own.

As observatory talks and children’s space books turned their attention to the Northern Lights, so did I. I joined a couple of groups on Facebook, followed a few key accounts on X and set-up alerts through Telegram. And did they ever pay dividends!

Missed opportunity

My phone was going crazy with notifications pretty much every night. Weather permitting, those in Scotland were having great luck seeing the Northern Lights. Further south, we weren’t quite as fortunate.

Then one night in April 2023, the phone started pinging relentlessly around 10pm – incoming Aurora alerts galore. As I often do, I fell to sleep on the settee and was awoken around 1:45am by a flurry of notifications. This was not a drill. I peered outside and saw a wall of cloud. Thinking better of standing on a cold, dark seafront in the middle of the night with little chance of seeing what I actually wanted to see, I headed up to bed and returned to my slumber – big mistake!

Logging onto Facebook the next day, I found lots of people sharing a post from a local photographer with some stunning shots of a wonderful Northern Lights display. My night’s sleep was not worth it at this point. I actually thought this might be my only opportunity to tick a big item off my bucket list.

Trips in the year to Scotland and the dark skies of the North Yorkshire Moors proved fruitless, but once the clocks went back, I didn’t have long to wait to see the light show.

A fantasy firework display

Since about the same age as I first became interested in the Northern Lights, I’ve not seen the point of Bonfire Night. The 2023 version was no different – avoid fireworks at any and all costs.

I was actually parenting at a children’s party in the late-afternoon, glancing at my phone every so often to check the football scores. And then about 5pm it started. ‘Ping-ping-ping’. Notification after notification. This was more than not a drill, this was a red alert – as soon as it gets dark, head outside and the Northern Lights should be visible.

We left the party in Cleethorpes with clear skies above us. The benefit of winter means darker nights, no waiting to the wee hours to see anything. I quickly bundled my eldest daughter into the car and headed for a spot on the seafront where there’s a walk-way and a lack of light pollution. What happened next is hard to describe.

We got out of the car and there were a couple gazing out across the Estuary, Jupiter was providing quite the attaction as it seemingly rose out of the sea. But they had no idea what it was we were so excited about. I quickly assembled my tripod and started to gaze north. It’s really hard to explain what it was like. There was a weird kind of smell in the air, the sort you get when the grass is wet before a thunder and lightning storm. You could also feel electricity in the air (a Gorillaism if ever there was one), which given the circumstances is perhaps not to be unexpected.

Then it happened. Not to the north as I expected, but to the north-east – directly across the Estuary. I could see a hint of red to the eye and at first thought this might just be the remnants of sunset, as it wasn’t quite fully dark yet. Pointing my camera in the general direction of where I could see red in the sky, I was shocked at the dazzling array of colours I could see – greens, yellows, a hint of purple, all dancing across the screen.

The red was really strong to the naked eye. We later learnt that the streak going horizontal across the sky was a phemoneon known as STEVE (not bad to tick that off on the first occasion seeing the Northern Lights). With more red twinkling down from the sea to the Estuary, my eldest daughter remarked that it looked like a ‘giant England flag’!

Some quick snaps and a timelapse video later and we were done. I must admit being overcome with a little emotion. It was simply breathtaking to see so clearly (and relatively easily) something that many people had told me I would never be able to achieve. We were so happy when our humble photos and video were showcased at our January 2024 astronomy beginners’ meeting.

The Greatest Show on Earth

With the sun approaching solar maximum sometime between later in 2024 and early in 2026, we can expect more fantastic aurora displays over the next few months , but nothing could have prepared me for the events of the evening of Friday 10 May.

The great thing I have found about astronomy in general is the random people that will join you, even if they have no interest in the subject at all, and sharing their joy at seeing something they weren’t expecting. This happened to us with the Super Moon of September 2023, when we had the clearest view possible of moonrise over the sea and a group of people stopped their walk to a night out to join us. ‘What are you looking at out there?’. ‘Give it two minutes and you will see something brilliant’. And then seeing the look of shock and amazement on their faces when the moon peeked up over the horizon, looking like it was merely a few miles away.

It has happened with Aurora chasing too. There was a chance in late-April when I headed up to my usual spot near Humberston and was joined by a chap who worked locally but lived in Dorset. It was very chilly for the time of year and we only got a slight green hue on the horizon before I decided to call it a night but the conversation about the Northern Lights, finding out the information from the same Facebook group, and other astronomical phenomenon was richly rewarding.

Just a few weeks later and I hit the jackpot. We had actually been to our astronomy session earlier in the night, and been lucky enough to view some great shots of the Moon through the giant telescope. We had already had a great night. The lateness of sunset meant I was flying solo for the anticipated light show. I was prepared though. Online groups had been abuzz for a few days, the national media was predicting a big event, and there were murmurings as we left the observatory – the number of alerts pinging on my phone made me seem like the most popular person in the world!

I want to reiterate at this point that nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see. Upon leaving the house, I always take a quick handheld test shot to see if the camera is already picking something up. My eyes were not adjusted to the dark yet (remember sunset was barely 45 minutes prior), so I didn’t see the green hues that the camera was showing, even with street and house lights, until I reviewed the photos the next morning.

Upon arriving at my usual location around 10:45pm, I was taken aback by the number of people already there. The car park was full and I squeezed onto the end. There were hundreds of people gazing to the sky, a far cry from the previous record of four that I had seen there, which included two doing so by mere coincidence!

I moved a little further towards the beach than I normally do to get some space. There was a young couple there too and once the show kicked into action, we spent most of the night taking photos, sharing stories – a real community spirit to the whole affair.

Again, I wasn’t picking up the green hue, so it was a matter of waiting patiently. The green became clearer around half an hour later but my first thought was ‘is this it?’. After all that anticipation and build-up, this was really no better than the brief glimpse in April, let alone the show on Bonfire Night. And then it happened. I took a lean back in my chair and looked upwards. What was that? Beams of red, blue, purple, green were firing out of the sky like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Like a pantomime in full flow, it was behind me! I’d already learned from the 5 November occurrence that the Northern Lights aren’t necessarily in the north – the northern part means Northern Hemisphere – but I never expected to be looking due south.

A heavenly message

Then things turned up a notch. After about half an hour of the light show I was used to, dazzling walls of colour dripping down from the sky, turned into something altogether more grand.

The sky ripped open above my head revealing a bright, white light. It was as if the heavens themselves had spoken. This was the Corona, the Northern Lights moving directly above my location. Rays of colour shot down in all directions like a multicoloured midday sun. I audibly gasped and grabbed my breath, I’d never seen anything like this.

I furiously snapped away – photos and timelapse videos. Anything to capture this historic occasion. Easily visible to the naked eye, it then became time to just sit back and savour the moment. And then it hit me…

Darting in and out of the spectrum of light were whisps of white – angelic apparitions gliding their way between the earth and the heavens. The white light got stronger, shining down like a beam from the very point of creation itself. The colours continued to tantalise, darting and dancing their way across the horizon and the backdrop of the night sky, as if a hidden conductor was orchestrating a celestial symphony.

I was mesmerised. Then it hit me again. What did the ancients think of this unearthly phenomenon? Some very brief research tells me that Galileo first coined the phrase ‘Aurora Borealis’ in 1619 – less than 500 years ago. But then we didn’t discover the science behind an aurora until the turn of the 20th century. This thought actually floored me. I lay on the ground, putting the camera to one side for a short time and just gazed up into the sky that was bedecked with purples, pinks, greens and more in between.

Questioning the sky

This changes everything. Even with the brief flirtations into astronomy as detailed elsewhere on this blog, it had never really occurred to me the link between the universe and the spiritual journey that we’re on through life. And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This is just a series of events that took place on one night, never mind the once-in-a-lifetime sights that have occurred over the trillions of days since the earth was created – from comets to supernovas, aurora to eclipses, conjunctions to super moons – and whatever other unrecorded phenomena the celestial forces have created.

To quote the famed astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “In life, and in the universe, it is always best to keep looking up.” – truly the greatest show on earth.