One day me and my sister were finishing up a day of working together from home in Halifax, when we got a notification on our phones about the aurora being visible that night. We had both been hoping to see the northern lights for a while, and we had been keeping an eye on the aurora forecasts, but we had never actually seen them before, so we were pretty excited about the possibility of finally seeing them.
While the solar storm was set to be pretty strong, the forecast was saying that the aurora was only going to be visible in the northern parts of Nova Scotia, and we were in the southern part, so we weren't sure if we were actually going to be able to see them or not, but we decided to give it a try anyway. There was also quite of bit of cloud cover over much of Nova Scotia,which wasn't helping our odds of seeing the aurora. My sister proposed that we drive to where we can more easily see them, so I sat down and did my best to take look through the forecasts and see where that might be.
It turns out that the best option was for us to drive to PEI. Now this is a considerable drive, and it was already pretty late. My sister started talking with some of her friends to see if they wanted to come, and some of them were. My sisters boyfriend (now husband) offered to drive all of us in his truck, which was really nice of him, and it let us blow up a mattress in the back of the truck to lie on while we watched the aurora. We packed up some blankets and went to pick up our friends, and then we set off for PEI.
The drive was long and mostly uneventful. We got to PEI pretty late and already we could begin to see some of the aurora from inside the truck. We pulled over, eager to see the aurora and we were not disappointed. The sky was crystal clear, and the aurora was dancing in very active pulsing ribbons. We were all in awe of the beauty of it, and we spent a long time just standing around looking at it. After a while though we decided we could find a better spot than just the side of the road in some mud, so we got back in the truck and drove some more. The aurora was getting stronger and stronger as time went on, and we were all getting more and more excited to find a good spot to watch it from.
The aurora as seen from the side of the road, just as we pulled over to watch it.
We ended up finding a nice little farm road on top of a hill that had a great view of the sky, and we pulled over to watch the aurora from there. We got the bed of the truck all set up with blankets and things and settled in to watch the show. It was a ton of fun to all be clambered together in the back of the truck, oohing and ahhing at the aurora together.
Some of our group sitting in the back of the truck watching the aurora.
The aurora was in a strange pattern that I had never even hear of before. It was like an eye with radial lines coming out of it. You could see pulses shooting up and down the lines towards the center of it. We were so luck as to be sat right under that focal point of the aurora, so we had a perfect view of it. It was really magical to be there experiencing it with my sister and our friends. We stayed out there for a long time just watching the aurora, and we were all pretty sad when it finally started to fade away. While I have seen weaker auroras since, this is the only time I have ever seen one that looked better in person that on camera.
The aurora as seen from the back of the truck, in its radial pattern.
I have a bunch of pictures of the aurora, and I really want to share them but there are too many. That being said I will share one more, which might be my favourite picture of the night.
The aurora on the horizon.