England and the Northern Lights
It’s rare to be able to see the aurora borealis in the UK. Northern Scotland gets sightings most winter months, but it doesn’t often get seen further south.
As the photo above shows, we have been having a BRILLIANT couple of nights in southern England, where the skies get lit up. Stonehenge is in Wiltshire- which might get a sight like this once in a generation. People in London have taken photos- if they can get away from the city’s lights. Even Cornwall has been able to enjoy the sight.
Why? According to the Met Office (The UK’s national weather service) “A coronal hole high speed stream arrived this evening combined with a rather fast coronal mass ejection leading to #Aurora sightings across the UK.”
According to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the aurora is made up of atoms and molecules in our atmosphere colliding with particles from the sun. The lines of force in the Earth’s magnetic field cause the wavy patterns of light. The colours are created by different gases; the green is caused by oxygen, and the purple, blue and pink are caused by nitrogen. The lowest part of an aurora is usually around 80 miles from Earth’s surface, but the top could be many hundreds of miles above our planet.
People in the south are excited by this! We don’t often get the chance - rarely seen this far south, and all-too-often cloud cover dims the chances even more.
I’ve been in southern England for (GAK) 47 years and this is the first time I’ve seen them. If you are on Twitter, check out @aurorawatchuk, where the space physicists at Lancaster University will tweet when the aurora may be visible from the UK.
The photo above makes me wonder what the Neolithic and bronze age people who built Stonehenge and the other monuments on the Salisbury Plain would have made of such a sight.