After realising that it would be impossible to see the Northern Lights within the time limit of my list, I decided to think of an alternative for my list and move seeing the Northern Lights until after my 30th. Originally I was going to go to an Aurora Night up north, although it wasn’t likely I would see anything in August, but this was fully booked. So instead I attended a stargazing night at the same observatory.
As it turned out, ticking this goal off my list turned out to be more of an adventure than I anticipated! My mum kindly offered to drive me to the event, which was over 4 hours away in the car, and which started at 11.30pm. So we headed off and all was going well, until the sat nav directed us up a steep windy path. We headed up this path, which was kind of scary in the pitch black with loads of bushes on either side and nobody around. Eventually, after driving for a bit, we thought maybe we were headed in the wrong direction and decided to turn around and go back to see. However, in trying to turn round the car got stuck in a ditch and wouldn’t move (despite our best attempts at pushing!).
There was no signal so we realised the only option was to walk back down this creepy path and find somewhere we could call a rescue service from. Luckily we had brought torches as it was a really dark place (hence it being a suitable place for stargazing) and we wouldn’t have been able to see a thing without.
So we walked for quite some time down this path, me terrified someone was going to jump out on us and both of us worried about whether we were going to be able to find help! Luckily, once we got to the bottom, there was a house across the road which we decided (after a while of weighing up the options) to call at – frightening the people inside quite a lot, as they were currently in the process of watching a horror movie when they heard a knock on the door in the middle of the night!
Fortunately they were really lovely and kind and let us use the phone and come in and wait while two of them went up the path to try and get our car out – which they did!! 🙂
We were so ridiculously pleased and grateful but also quite tempted to just turn around and go back home. However, we thought after coming all that way we’d have another quick shot at finding the place, which we did!
After finally getting to the place, we spent a lovely two and a half hours there listening to them talking about star formations and galaxies (WAY over my head) and looking at things through telescopes. It was all very pretty. So I may not have seen the Northern Lights, but I saw galaxies, clusters, nebula and lots of other things up there in the sky (I’m sorry, it was all a bit sciencey for me so I can’t be more accurate than this, but it was impressive at the time)! I was also assured that some of the things I saw had been seen by less people than the Northern Lights had, which made me feel better about the list! I also held a piece of the moon and a piece of Mars and saw a shooting star.
So all in all, I may not have seen the Northern Lights yet, but this was an unexpectedly fun and interesting experience which I may never have got if I had!
(PS. Sorry there are no pics, I’m not nearly clever enough or in possession of good enough photographic equipment to get any of anything I saw, and it was too dark to get photos of much else!)
30 things to do before I turn 30 