RECORD STORE TALES #1124: Aurora Borealis
52 years of coming to the cottage, since my very birth, and there are still new things to see.
I used to think I was too far south to ever see the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). Certainly it has never happened before. However, we are heading into a Solar Maximum, which means a high point in the sun’s 11 year cycle of activity. The sun’s magnetic field is a twisty turny-thing, and every 11 years, it gets twisted up into an increasingly excited state, and the sun ejects massive eruptions of particles into the surrounding space. When our Earth eventually collides with the charged particles, they create brilliant shows of light in the sky. There are both northern and southern borealis, and in northern Canada, people can see the lights easily. Where I live in the southern tip, we never see the lights!
May 10, around 10:15 PM, the lights came to visit the shores of Lake Huron.
Jen and I headed down to the beach, as the Boston Bruins were getting mauled by the Florida Panthers. I kept my eyes north, assuming that was where I would see the lights. Disappointed, I shouted back at Jen, “There’s nothing yet.”
I noticed something as I looked back at her. The sky was “hazy”,
“Is that it?” I asked Jen as I looked straight up. There was a cloudy streak across the sky.
Then I looked south and saw the horizon glowing green. The northern lights were not coming from the north! They were all around us, in every direction, like a glowing curtain! It was not at all what I expected to see.
The light show peaked for about 15 minutes, on a very cold night. The lights shifted and changed, ever so slowly, so that you barely noticed. You could stare at a band of green until it faded and was suddenly replaced by swirls of red. The moon was a sharp crescent and it cut a hole through a band of green, as did a handful of bright stars.
Photographs and videos, of course, only tell part of the story, and only insofar as technology can capture. The real colours and the subtle wispy cloudy bands we saw are lost in photos.
Directly overhead appeared to be the center of it all. Radiating out from a central point were bands of cloudy white, like a celestial starfish. Jen and I pondered this and wondered if the solar particles were hitting at that point.
I wish I had been listening to “Purple Rain” at that moment. It did almost look like purple rain at times.
Jen and I had a moment on the previous night, listening to “Purple Rain” during sunset. It was an uplifting, somewhat surreal moment to hear Prince soloing and singing over the sight of the glowing sky. Imagine if we had it playing during the borealis!
The bone-chilling cold of the Kincardine night cut our visit short, but I can now say I’ve seen the Northern Lights.
Bucket list achieved.