We went to Finland in 2014 to see the northern lights and spent a week looking at thick cloud. Since then it has become an obsession for Karen, staring at the sky every time the Aurora Watch app suggests there might be some activity. (The facts that we’re in the south of England, and it’s cloudy seem not to deter her). At 0251 on Monday morning in Flamborough, we finally managed the combination of latitude, solar activity and starry sky. Obviously I had all the wrong cameras with me, so all we managed were some rubbishy shots on our phones, but they’re still way more impressive than you can see with the naked eye. You could definitely see columnar structure and colour wash, just not the detail and saturation the camera manages.
Elsewhere on our trip up north, there were two lifers. We twitched the Brown Booby on the Tees: it left the close perch just before we arrived, but at least it hung around for us. A few days’ seawatching at Flamborough proved productive, with four species of Shearwater, including Cory’s, a UK lifer, and four species of Skua. It’s a good job that the seawatching was good – there was nothing at all on land.