Ramsgate & the noctilucent clouds

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Hear the behind the scenes story about this image:

Read the behind the scenes story – audio transcribed:

When the Aurora season ends, I mean ‘ends’ in inverted commas. The Aurora is happening all year round 24/7 but the times of year that we get to witness it will have peaks and troughs because of the high summer sun, gives the short evenings and very, very light evenings and therefore makes it quite difficult to see the Aurora.

So in summer, another phenomenon can occur, and these are called noctilucent clouds and say they are, very, very high altitude ice crystals that form clouds in our mesosphere. And they’re visible because as the sun sets and drops below the horizon, there’s still some of the rays of light bending round Earth’s surface, and they will bend. And it’s then the clip, all of these high altitude ice crystals in our atmosphere, and it illuminates them in this bright white way in dusk hours of the day.

And so you may have seen these without realising that they’re there, because that’s certainly true for me. And I remember driving home in high summer from weddings. Think it’s so weird because, like, the sun set a while back and now they these white clouds in the sky. And I never looked into why, but I know I definitely thought that.

And so when I understood them, and I started to follow the Aurora and, was in community talking about that with a lot of people, quite a few of the groups, will switch over to focusing on talking about the noctilucent or NLC or night shining clouds when it’s summer so that, people can then share their experiences and where they’re seeing and, to, to help and support other people to see them.

And so it’s really interesting to me that they appear, however, they come with an alarm bell that it’s a possibility that they’re becoming more visible more regularly, because of the instability in our troposphere. And then that is pushing some of the layer of the mesosphere up and then it’s thought that it might be the reason why those instabilities in that layer, we’re seeing then more ice crystals form and it’s all to do with like the, the global, climate crisis and the amount of change that is happening in those atmospheric levels.

So it could be as beautiful as these NLC clouds are, a bit like bioluminescence, it can be a warning if it is becoming more present more regularly. That nature is just dazzling in a way, to try and give us the biggest warning sign that it’s in trouble and it needs help.

So, the jury’s out at the moment as to whether there is a 100% correlation between the climate crisis, and then visibility of these noctilucent clouds and so hopefully that will become clearer, in time. But that gives you a little overview of what noctilucent clouds are, and the first night I ever got them here, I wasn’t sure whether I would get them again the next night because they’re very, very fickle and so I went round each town, as I could think of so one in Ramsgate, one in Broadstairs. I stopped at Kingsgate and then on to, to Margate just to capture, or try and capture again, like having that foreground that tells the story that we are based here in Thanet and these images are here and so that just sort of feeds into the, the approach and the work before, I go out. And so, yeah, it’s absolutely incredible to me that we get to see these.