Norora Borealis

Last night was a delightfully pointless road trip with cosmolinguist.

Just as I was having a pre-dinner nap, I heard about the Aurora Borealis being particularly strong and visible across the UK that night. Aware of the full moon, I cross referenced a map of stargazing sites with the cloud coverage map to try and find somewhere cloud-free, and came up with Malham in the Yorkshire Dales, a Dark Skies Discovery Site.

We jumped in the car and drove there fuelled by Radio 1 dance anthems and talking nonsense at each other as per usual. By the time we arrived, so had a light cloud cover. That was enough for the full moon to drown out the sky, so there was no chance of seeing the aurora. Plus it turns out the site is south-facing.

We did see a lovely moon halo, but so did mother_bones back home while walking Gary! After a while faffing around in the literally freezing car park, we headed home. Despite failing to see the aurora, the journey was more important than the destination and it was good to get E out of the house for a while and spend some time together.