[58/465] Aurora maybealis

[cosmolinguist]

I woke up today thinking "has my nystagmus ever been this bad?!" I'm sure I've thought that a few times before. But I can never remember just how bad it was at any given time so it's hard to tell if this really was the worst.

Still, anytime I wonder that, it isn't good. Usually it gets worse as the day goes on so to wake up feeling this bad didn't bode well.

And I knew I had a difficult day at work. It was really stressful.

And only when I was fitting another meeting into my afternoon did I remember I had a volunteer meeting for two hours right after work. This, of course, is because I'd just promised mother_bones I'd help her in the garden once I finished work. Suddenly, I couldn't even make dinner.

Both work and the volunteer thing were really intense.

So not long before I could finally escape the computer, I got a text from D. I thought it might be about dinner or something, and I wasn't at all expecting it to say what it said: "Thinking about going for a drive ~45 mins north to a stargazing spot, to see if we can see the Aurora Borealis. Wanna go?"

Of course I did.

He sent links to a couple places, told me the forecast was partly cloudy, and sent me a quote: "According to the Met Office, the best place to see the Northern Lights tonight is in the North West region of Scotland. However, Northern areas of England, such as Manchester, also have a high chance of seeing the lights due to the higher likeliness of 'transitory cloud breaks'."

It delighted me to see Manchester (famously rainy) mentioned as a place to see something in the sky.

So we ate our pizza and got in the car!

D explained that he'd chosen three sites, marked on his sat nav. In increasing distance and in kind of a line, so if one didn't work out we could get to the next without too much trouble.

Or so it seemed. At the first place -- "This better not be a dogging site," D said, just before we pulled into a car park near a car with steamed up windows -- we were mostly transfixed by the red light on Winter Hill, and debated whether the glow we were seeing through filmy cloud was the northern lights or Blackburn.

Finding this inconclusive, D suggested we try the further away site. I warned mother_bones we'd be back a little later and he drove until...the exit we wanted on the motorway was closed. We had no choice but to drive to the next one.

Which was ten miles away!

By the time we'd driven that far out of our way, we thought rather than trying to wend our way back to the neatly-marked spot on D's map via A roads, we might as well see if there were any dark spots nearby. Consulting the stargazing map found us a dark sky area ten minutes away.

This car park had an idling car in it that stopped when we parked and walked away. We followed a little path through a stile and by a river. D said this is how horror movies start. The northern sky appeared pretty much as it had before: not overcast but cloudy. Glowing faintly (was it from nearby towns? the half-moon? aurora?).

We took some selfies (D one in the dark, mine one with unexpected flash but at least you can see our faces), admired stars (with the help of an app, D determined that one he could see is "delta Boo," δ Boötis.

Our eyes adjusted to the light from the moon and whatnot and we walked back holding hands, without needing the phone flashlight that had gotten us down the path. Despite D's pessimistic proclamations, the shaved-head-leather-jacket guy now standing next to the formerly-idling car had not cut our brakes -- I pointed out that if he did it'd just mean D's car would reverse into his car as we tried to leave, and D said that'd be his excuse to murder us.

As we got on the motorway home, unmurdered, the Radio 1 DJ said, "Apparently the northern lights are out tonight?!" I laughed so hard.

Soon, the same DJ said, "Up next is Sian Eleri and the Power Down Playlist."

"No power down!" D said. "Playlist for get D home in one awake!"

That's what he said.

The closed exit taking us out of our way was meant to be foreshadowing, clearly. On the way back, the motorway we needed was closed and kicked us off a couple exits early. Then D wanted to stop to buy snacks but the services (US: rest area) was closed! Then the turn we needed at a roundabout was closed. We were close enough to home that it was just funny, it was no stress for D to find another route home.

"So you think we saw it tonight," D said at one point.

"I think we did!" I said. "I don't think that was just Blackburn." I remembered the light behind the clouds pulsing. But was that just my nystagmus, heh.

He looked skeptical.

"Schrödinger's aurora," I said.

"Aurora maybealis," he said, and we both laughed.

We'd both had a miserable day -- he'd been stuck in bed all morning with a headache and similar, and hadn't gotten much done today beyond making us all dinner -- and this was such a silly thing to do on a work night. Tomorrow is full of stressful meetings for me, Wednesday I'm delivering training -- which I do about once a month and looked forward to in the past, but what will be "last month's" was only last week and it left kind of a bad taste in my mouth...

Arguably tonight, after such a long and tiring day, is the worst time to do something silly with my evening when I'd been half-expecting to eat my dinner and go right to bed. But also arguably the best time. I'd have only laid awake being miserable about not sleeping and miserable that nothing nice had happened to me all day.

I can just fail to see an aurora any day, I have done so almost every day of my life (the only time I have seen it, I was very small and my dad hollered at me to come outside what felt like late at night: my memories are vague because of my young age and the lack of glasses I would've had then, but I remember the orange light in the sky). Maybe-failing to see it today was a lot of work! And with my favorite person.

So even if I didn't see an aurora today, it's my favorite day that I didn't see an aurora.

Comments

[lilysea]

That sounds lovely ^_^

[gender_euphoric]

Oooh!
For a while I was in an aurora hunters Facebook group—maybe I’m still in it for all I know. A few times since I’ve lived in southern Wisconsin it’s supposedly been visible, but there’s just too much light pollution here. I want to go up way north in the national forest with my telescope this summer.

It's worth the trip

[jesse_the_k]

I've seen Northern Lights in the winter at the northern shore of Lake Mendota (from the Yahara River locks, where the city's lights are mostly behind me).

As well as in the summer in Rhinelander and once in the Faroe Islands.

It's delightfully chaotic.

[radiantfracture]

That's a lovely story.