Seeing the Aurora For The First Time

Last night was cloudy before the thunderstorms moved in, no view of the sky. But at 3AM I woke up to pee and looked at my watch which gets weather via bluetooth from the phone, and it was reporting clear, and I thought maybe I’d go out and see if there was anything to see. Glad I did!

I’m over fifty, many times over the decades there have been predictions of aurora visible far into the south, but I’ve never seen anything at all. Here at 43° north its certainly not visible often. I had no real idea what it really looks like. You see photos but time exposures of dim things in the dark are not really representative of the real experience. There’s lots of things that look a lot more spectacular in person than in a photo, but you can see a photo and have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to look like. This, not so much.

I put on a night dress and slipped on shoes and went out to the back/side yard. The sky was cloudless. Looking around I saw what looked like a few scattered high thin clouds, stars visible through them. When you live in a city you are used to clouds at night being lit up. But they’d fade, and suddenly appear, and move in a way quite different from the steady drift in the wind of clouds. That’s the thing! I put a coat on and spent a good long time out past three in the morning looking up.

Sometimes scattered splotches of light, sometimes many, sometimes suddenly popping into appearance. Often a vertical striped appearance. For an interval it really picked up, I was craning my neck to look up to the zenith, rays of light radiating down suddenly appearing and fading, lower the shimmering flickering effects in the sheets of light. Aurora from zenith to just above tree/house level maybe a third of the way around the circle of the horizon. It looked white to my eyes except for an interval when a segment out of the expanse was in very clear purple.

I was holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the lights on the building, looking up above the streetlights, in a city where we take for granted nighttime clouds are lit up. What this would look like in a dark place!