Watching northern lights from the UK

11:18am Friday 4th April 2008

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Here's a question for you - where do you have to go to see the northern lights?

If you answered "The North Pole" (or "South Pole") then you were wrong, because although they are visible from both Poles, you don't actually have to travel to - literally - the ends of the Earth to see the northern lights.

The famous aurora borealis can occasionally be seen from the UK and some of those times they can be seen from here, in Cumbria.

How come? Well, cutting a very long story short, the northern lights are caused by unbelievably violent explosive events on the Sun, which vomits and belches enormous amounts of solar material and radiation out into space.

If Earth gets in the way of this material, and if certain conditions are right, then it can interact with the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field to create amazingly beautiful displays of coloured lights in the night sky - the northern lights.

Most of the time those "certain conditions" are only favourable for people living in very high latitudes, which is why it's commonly believed that the aurora can only be seen from places like Canada or Norway.

But occasionally those conditions change, allowing the aurora to move southward, bringing it into view from countries like the UK.

Of course, there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is, this doesn't happen very often, maybe on two or three nights in an average year (and of course they're usually the cloudiest, most rain-soaked nights). The good news is that thanks to Sun-monitoring satellites we now get up to two days' warning of a possible display of the aurora, so we can make sure we're keeping an eye on the sky that night if it's clear.

Why am I telling you this? Well, statistically, the start of spring has always been a good time for displays of the northern lights - strong enough to be visible from the UK - so I'm just asking you to make sure you look up on any clear nights during the next month or so, just in case.

If you want to make doubly sure you don't miss anything exciting, you can check for aurora predictions' on a number of websites. (If you don't have Internet access at home, work or school, why not go into Kendal Library and use its computers?) Or just check my blog for Aurora Alerts', the address of which you'll find at the end of this piece.

So, if all these things work together, what could you see?

Well, most displays of the northern lights are, it has to be said, quite subtle and gentle, nothing like the dramatic footage you see on TV or in movies. That footage is invariably speeded up and enhanced.

A typical display consists of pale curtains of grey-green or pale orange light, swaying very slowly above the northern horizon. Occasionally a beam of similarly-coloured light shoots up from the curtain for a few seconds before fading away again, but that's it.

However, occasionally a display evolves into a storm' and then...

...well, looking back through my observing books from 2001, here's how I described the best display I have ever seen.

"By 10.30pm half the sky was glowing, the stars all but obscured by ghostly auroral light, and by 11pm, facing the north, I had pink-hued rays and curtains blazing on my left and right, reaching to unbelievable altitudes, sometimes appearing solid, other times breaking up into multiple features, but always bright and always beautiful. The sky between them was glowing a patchy pale green, as if backlit, and every few minutes an arc would appear before me, stretching right across my field of view, and its upper surface would suddenly break up into countless spiky rays and beams before they too joined up into a slowly-rippling curtain... and all the time the red curtains grew brighter and taller.

"I'll admit I was lost, completely lost. I've never experienced anything like that before in my life. I didn't know which way to turn, I was like a child in an aquarium, or a zoo, head turning left then right, left then right again, lost in the wonders I was seeing, scared of missing something if I looked in any one direction for a moment too long.

"The sky was being airbrushed by a crazed cosmic artist, painted red and pink and green.

"But then it became even more impossible. It started moving, shimmering, and I was lost all over again as I watched, jaw hanging open in disbelief. I saw the arch rippling, material flowing' from right to left. It was the most bizarre, most incredible thing, as if I was watching a Chinese banner fluttering and cracking right above my head.

"The red rays returned, and grew larger with every passing moment until they had been transformed into sharp-edged, sharply-slanting wedges of red, meeting overhead in a beautiful corona. In the end I succumbed to the moment; I stretched out my arms and turned round and round, slowly, a huge Cheshire cat grin on my face as the sky above and around me began to burn. And as the brightness increased, and the colours deepened, I began to hear birds singing, fooled into thinking dawn had arrived, the most amazing thing... dogs began to bark all across town too, though whether they were alarmed by the appearance of the sky or by the exclamations of their sky-gazing owners I'll never know.

"All I know is that standing there, alone, on that school playing field, I felt dwarfed and humbled by the Universe."

I can't promise you a display that good but I can promise you that if you don't at least look for it you'll never see it. All we can do is cross our fingers and hope that the northern lights head south in April.

l Blog address: http://journals.aol.com/stuartatk/Cumbrian-Sky