Out of this World - Northern Lights in Cork

We humans sure are a peculiar bunch. As we go about our daily lives, rushing from work to play to home, struggling with bills or chafing in jobs that, for the vast majority of people, simply aren’t that fulfilling, we often forget just how breathtaking, how staggering, the world around us is. Indeed, even in this time of unprecedented access to knowledge, many of us never seem to lift their eyes too far from the infinitesimally small part of our own planet we call home to marvel at the wonder all around us, from the lushness of this world to the magnificent desolation ensconcing that little aquamarine jewel we call home. I myself have fallen victim to this mindset more than once. 

In light of this, it is always nice when Mother Nature sends us a reminder of just how incredible our cosmos is. One such reminder passed by Earth back in Summer 2020. As humanity lay in the grips of the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, it floated serenely through the evening skies of the northern hemisphere, completely unbothered by the trauma unfolding on our terraqueous madhouse. Comet C/2020 F3 Neowise served as a welcome distraction from the increasingly turbulent conditions on our homeworld and a potent reminder that we are but a small element of a vastly bigger ensemble.

And just in the last few days, whilst C/2020 F3 Neowise is only a few years into its 3500 trek back to the Oort Cloud, in the first days of October 2024, we were hit by another such reminder. The Sun, the central star of our solar system, emits a regular stream of charged particles as a result of the ongoing nuclear fusion processes in its core that also produce the light and radiation both essential and inimical to life on this planet. This solar wind is constantly hitting, and interacting with, the Earth’s magnetic field, and some of it is channelled towards the polar regions, where they interact with Oxygen and Nitrogen atoms in the upper parts of our atmosphere. The resulting ethereal apparitions are known as the northern lights or also aurora borealis, and their near constant presence in the cold and dark months of the arctic and subarctic winter has firmly ensconced them in the mythologies of many of the local peoples, from Bodø in Norway to Barrow in Alaska.

However, whilst we might perceive the sun as a constant, reliable source of light and warmth, nothing could be further from the truth. It is a violent, roiling hellscape of superheated gas and radiation so intense that it makes Chernobyl seem like a sleepy kitten by comparison. It’s surface convulses under their force of plasma upwellings driven up from the indescribably hot and dense interior, riven by magnetic fields so intense that no manmade object could survive for more than a few seconds. This activity waxes and wanes, driven by processes still not fully understood by science, reaching a peak every eleven or so years. The next peak, the solar maximum, is expected to arrive in 2025.

In the run up to this solar maximum, the sun becomes increasingly more active, more prone to flares and coronal mass ejection, exceedingly violent events in which parts of the sun’s magnetic fields fold in on themselves and are hurled out into space at incredible velocities, carrying with it massive amount of gas and plasma from the sun’s outer layers. When such a CME hits the Earth’s magnetic field, it can squeeze it down, forcing the field lines that carry charged particles into the Earth’s atmosphere away from the poles and towards the equator. When this happens, the effects can be nothing short of mind-blowing, with disruptions in radio communications, the failure of all kinds of satellites, and even induced currents in power grids down on the surface which can shut down entire sections of that power grid. On a slightly less destructive note, these. “Geomagnetic Storms” can also push the northern lights far from their usual stomping grounds into more southerly latitudes. During one particularly intense geomagnetic storm, the Carrington Event of 1859, the Aurora was visible as far south as Miami! The flare that hit Earth on Thursday, October 10th, 2024, was thankfully far less severe than the Carrington Event and yet, it still caused an extremely strong geomagnetic storm, classified by the Space Weather Prediction Center of NOAA, the United States’ atmospheric research agency, as a G4, or severe, event. The scale for measuring the severity of these geomagnetic storms is similar to the scale used for hurricanes, so a category 4 event is pretty intense.

When I first took this picture, I wasn't sure if this was actually the real thing or just a camera aberration.

This shot sealed the deal for me. This was real!

I only found out about this G4 event on the evening it was supposed to hit us. To be fair, I had a lot on my mind. I’d recently suffered from a likely burnout-related breakdown and had only left my job of five and a half years two days earlier. Either way, on the evening in question, I had an invitation to dinner followed up by a few pints with a number of friends and former colleagues, and even as the first images of auroras in Ireland appeared on social media, first in Donegal, then down the country in Galway, Wicklow, Kerry and even Wexford, my priority was still hanging out with these people, many of whom I’d known for years. It wasn’t until I staggered out of the pub after some after-dinner drinks that my interests turned skywards. Even then, it would take me until midnight to get to a place where I would even have a chance of seeing the northern lights in person. And to be honest, at first, the night sky didn’t really seem special, Then I got out my phone. The very first shots I took, free-hand and blurred, showed a band of green stretching across the entire northern sky, topped out by some blue around the edges. I was still sceptical, I’d been burned by false excitement around the northern lights before. But a second shot at another section of the sky confirmed it. The northern lights were here! In those first few minutes, just before midnight, the aurora was pretty much invisible to the naked eye in my light-polluted neighbourhood. My phone camera’s night mode was able to reveal the beauty of this phenomenon, but even then, it took several seconds of night mode exposure. Trying to use my wide-angle lense to get a shot of the entire night’s sky turned out to be counterproductive, so I decided to warm up a little.

Now we're talking. Activity really picked up at around twenty minutes past midnight.

Things changed about twenty minutes later. On a whim, I decided to head back out and immediately noticed what looked like a fog bank stretching across the sky, one through which you could still see the brighter stars. A quick check with my phone camera confirmed my suspicions. The northern lights had intensified and were now clearly visible with the naked eye, still somewhat bleached out by the light pollution but easy to spot regardless. Once again, it was my phone’s camera that revealed the true beauty of these ethereal apparitions, writhing in the tenuous gossamer threads of the outermost layers of Earth’s atmosphere. However, Mother Nature still wasn’t done yet. As I clicked away with my phone camera, even my unaided eye began to pick up the colours of this unearthly spectacle, the slow, undulating dance playing out far above me, literally. The northern lights were no longer just a phenomenon of the northern sky, they were all around me, above me. At this moment, standing out on my balcony, watching this beautiful spectacle play out in front of me, directly above me, the magic really hit me. I was experiencing the true beauty and power of our cosmos at play. I felt small, unimportant, and yet at the same time I was witnessing, in a way being a part of, this awesome spectacle. I wanted to shout from the rooftops about what was going on, wanted to bring everyone out so they could see the wonder above our heads. Yet, I stood alone, the world around me perfectly still. I realised that I had been granted a rare privilege.

This is probably the closest I can get to how my eyes saw the peak of the aurora display.

At this point, the northern lights were all around me...

Including directly above, which was nothing sort of breathtaking!

As the night wore on, the splendour of the northern lights slowly began to dim, and by the time I turned in at around 1.30 AM on a cold Friday night, it was clear that my audience with the cosmos was over. But there’s no denying that it changed me. Seeing the northern lights had been one of my life goals, I’ve even planned a trip to Norway partially to see them, and now, they had been delivered quite literally to my doorstep. To say I was floating on a high would be an understatement, in fact, I’m still riding that high as I’m putting the finishing touches on this post two days later.

Aurora's last gleaming - By around 1.30 AM on Thursday, activity had noticeably decreased.

Why am I writing this? I don’t know, but the events of Thursday night and early Friday morning have moved me in a way that simply needs to be expressed. And perhaps as a timely reminder that, even as I look into an increasingly uncertain future, that the true beauty of our cosmos can manifest at the most unlikely of times.