Botany Bay Aurora

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Read the behind the scenes story – audio transcribed:

So the Botany Bay Aurora, this happened in March 2023, and I’ve been chasing Aurora for the last decade, and had always had to go North to try and see it, and I was always very, very envious of people who lived in Norfolk that would often pick it up where I couldn’t. And I knew that from conversations with my late grandfather, it was possible to see the Aurora here in Thanet.

He grew up on Newington Road in Ramsgate, and he remembers in the Blitz with his friends when the lights would go out at night. He said those nights were so long and so boring, and a lot of them would meet up, and then they go and sit up at Jackie Bakers, at the fields there, and he said we’d just sit and watch the Aurora, it was something to do.

And I couldn’t believe it. He was so kind, a matter of fact about it. And I’m like, you saw it here? And he was like, yeah, of course. So I think one of the things that that really underscored for me is how much light pollution we have in the south of the UK. And you can see that in abundance in this Botany image.

You’ve got the ships that sit on the horizon waiting to, to dock into the Thames, freeports, and they just have that glow that absolutely takes away so much of your night vision when you’re looking at the north horizon. But also, as you can see in the image, there’s a lovely bit of green Aurora, more on the sort of horizon and the first section of the sky before it goes into those lovely red pillars and beams.

And that light pollution from those boats can really kind of knock out what we might get to see on the horizon, depending on what’s moored off. And obviously it’s always changing, they’re always moving. Sometimes I think, I wish I could just shout out like “turn your lights off.”

And so, this night was a night I’d longed for. I knew that, you know, it was possible from grandad’s stories and from the kind of science I understand that it’s all technically possible, but seeing is believing. And the, I’d been watching the the space weather. And I knew that there was kind of a big peak of, space weather coming, that would maybe give us the Aurora.

And so when the alert started to come through and things really started to pick up with the stats, it was a week night. Michael already gone to bed and I was like, I’ve got to get out, I’ve got to go for this. So grabbed my tripod, shot out and, and I initially stopped near North Foreland and got some shots there. I thought, I need to get somewhere that has got really iconic, foreground, which again, is really hard to find in North Kent because we’ve got these vast coastlines, but everything is lined by street lights, and so when you’re trying to get some of the chalk in, a lot of it will then pick up that glow from the, all of the light pollution and the ambient light of the street lights.

So it’s quite hard because otherwise you’re shooting north, and there’s a horizon of the sea and the Aurora. There’s nothing really to, you know, Geo stamp where this shot has been taken, so that you can see that it is actually happening in Thanet. So, this little spot on Botany was amazing, and I probably was there for about an hour watching it. I was just beside myself because I could see it. You couldn’t see colour with the eye, but you could see white glow, and the pillars were really quite visible to the eye, as they picked right up into the sky.

And so, that night was the first. And I’ve caught it, I think eight or nine times now in Thanet. One of the big ones was the 5th November, but I just felt like the one I wanted to bring in for the 40 Frames for 40 was the one of the first photos that I shot of the Aurora, here in Thanet.