LAUREN BURNS • SPECIAL TO THE ANNAPOLIS VALLEY REGISTER Aurora lights up the sky
A rare display of the colourful celestial phenomenon known as the northern lights appeared over Nova Scotia on April 23.
“The way that I describe it to small kids is it’s like a big solar burp,” said Tiffany Fields, the astronomy technician at Saint Mary’s University’s Burkey-Gaffney Observatory.
She bundled up in a winter coat late Sunday night and drove out to a dark spot near Rainbow Haven beach near Cole Harbour to watch the show.
“I was up a little bit later than I wanted to be,” Fields said April 24, noting she was out Sunday from 11 p.m. until midnight.
“I’m sure it would have lasted a lot longer,” Fields said.
“What I thought was almost sort of like a tease was when I was out by Rainbow Haven, I couldn’t really see anything with just my eyes. But just a short camera exposure with my iPhone on its night mode — with a one-second or three-second exposure — you could clearly see the colours. I thought it was incredible.”
The northern lights stem from a corona mass ejection from the sun a few days back, she said.
“It takes a day or so for the charged particles from the sun to travel across the solar system and then to interact with the Earth’s magnetic field,” Fields said.
Their 150-million-kilometre journey ends in a splashy interaction with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, producing displays of brilliant colour in the northern sky.
“Generally with the northern lights we see a lot of greens, maybe some purples. The interactions with nitrogen in the air cause those green colours, and the interactions with oxygen high in the atmosphere cause more of those purple reds that you might see.”