Mother’s Day Aurora

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My second trip to Iceland wasn’t until March 2016, and I booked a couple of weeks with some friends and we were meeting around different parts of Iceland, and we’d seen that there was a chance that the Aurora could be quite strong that evening and at that point, Aurora chasing was still quite new to me. I was using apps that gave this KP score that, you know, made it look like there might be some Aurora at some point, but I didn’t really understand it.

And we were chatting to people in the hotel and then I overheard someone saying that the Aurora could be really visible from sunset. So we were having dinner, coffees were coming and I was thinking like, right, come on, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. And we were staying in Vik, so we drove out of the town and as we literally left the town lights over dusk, the Aurora was going absolutely wild across the whole sky.

And it was a new moon. And as the night started to fade from dusk and darkness really descended. It was so wild. I’d never seen Aurora like this. It was just across the sky, everywhere. Usually you looked south in the sky for the sorry, North in the sky for the Aurora. But it was across the whole of the sky and it was going down south. And one of the things that was most precious to me about this evening was, we’d been through a lot of heartbreak in the last few months as a family, and we’d lost my grandmother and my aunt within a space of three weeks of each other and so that was like my dad’s mom and his sister, and it was a really hard time.

And so when we’d landed at Mother’s Day, it was our first one without them. It blew my mind that this Aurora from Mother Nature happened on this day and two things happened that night. Firstly, as they Aurora starting to pick up in intensity, it was really dancing around and some of these pillars were dancing overhead almost and off south.

And they formed that heart shape in the sky and it’s there’s just moments like that through life where you of like, okay, I hear you, I see you, and I feel loved by you because I can see that you are wrapping that around me in that moment. And then as the show went on, the colour intensity was so visible to the eye and there were reds that were so vibrant red dancing away that night.

And I love that, because that was the favourite colour of both my aunt and my grandma. And so this Aurora that happened on that Mother’s Day in 2016, is really special to me. And it’s also one that in the Aurora community everybody talks about, because it was so visible across the UK that night and one of my good friends, has images she shot from Scotland.

And then I’ve got the ones from Iceland, and it’s amazing to see how different the storm looks in Scotland versus Iceland and the fact that we’ve, you know, documented that Aurora show from north and south. So we’ve really got an interesting angle on the, the show, but the, the one that stood out for me that I wanted to, to weave into this was the, the Mother’s Day Aurora heart for for those sentimental reasons.