If you go to Shetland (at 60ยบ North) in the winter, you will of course have a good chance of seeing the most amazing auroras. It’s topical, tonight, because this massive solar flare erupted on Sunday, and I believe it’s with Earth as we speak, and arriving at Mars in a day or two.
I’ve been looking at a site I didn’t know before, the NOAA’s Space Weather site. Interesting stuff, I thought. The word on the street is that this is a G2 storm, but might be a G3 eventually.
I used to stand on my north–facing back doorstep at Noss, out of sight of any lights from the other four houses, keeping watch on it, diving in at intervals to get warm, but unable to settle, and off out again.
One early evening I was going to work (for the Coastguard night watch) driving north up the main road to Lerwick, about 25 miles. The aurora was really mounting up to something special that night. I was trying to drive with my nose up against the windscreen. I gave up. Got out of the car and stood there, tears running down my face. I had never seen anything more beautiful. It was the most powerful display I’d ever known. I couldn’t reconcile the normality of the aurora with this awesome event. And felt so privileged, not to have missed it.
The vertical searchlights of green, yellow, blue, pink and all permutations were stretching high up, and shifting sideways back and forth like someone pulling a vast curtain from side to side, the folds passing in front of one another, and superimposed on all that was a layer of flame rising, just like a line of gas flames from east to west, but yellows and oranges, sometimes green and blue, and red. Deep red. I mention it particularly because red is unusual. Deep red is special. Even to those accustomed to the northern lights, it gets an honourable mention.
Well after a few minutes I pulled myself together and drove off. But it was the talk of the ops room when I got there.
Then one day in April (?), years later, in 2000, there was another, very special, very powerful display. So powerful that people on the south coast of the UK saw it.
I was at Noss as usual, and the living room door to the garden was wide open, and I kept writing about it in my diary then going out for another look. I spent most of the evening in the garden.
What was so weird was that the aurora wasn’t just in the north of my view. It spread around the hemisphere of my sky into the east and west, just as brilliant as the northern part. Vertical searchlights on full beam, a ring of them – every colour under the sun including vast areas of red, all shifting and pulsing, changing colours, all defying every notion of normal, even for an aurora.
It continued to grow sideways until the southern sky was full too. I was standing under an upturned basin of light. Could not believe it. Unprecedented.
A weird feeling had been with me for a few hours, since the display started. It was a while before I registered it consciously. I felt drunk. I was now lurching in and out of the house, and staggering all over the lawn. And the more it went on, the drunker I got. COMPLETELY SOBER I might add, cos I know what you’re thinking.
Then I looked up to the centre of the bowl. For mysterious reasons perhaps connected to the properties of magnetism, it is virtually impossible for there to be an aurora right over the centre. Just doesn’t happen. There’s always a hole there. And there’s always vacancy anywhere south of East or West, for that matter. But holding out my hand, I could just cover the hole.
As I stared, amazed, I saw two curling fingers reach out from north and south, and curl round each other, and – a split second – they touched, and the hole covered over for a minute, and the pulsing flashed gloriously out like rings on a pond….. I thought – I have just witnessed an event so special – as though the universe just gave birth to something.
Couldn’t believe what I had just seen with my own eyes.
Don’t think I’ve ever been the same since.
By the way ...
Talking to a friend on the phone next day – he was down near Inverness – he said he’d been for a walk in the woods early next morning and felt really weird, as though he was out of control. And he didn't know a thing about the aurora. I rest my case.
