Text 1: The night the sky turned pink, by Rachel Sedgwick

An original contemporary online article.

The alert came at half past ten, just as I was cleaning my teeth: a strong geomagnetic storm, aurora possible across the whole of the UK. I have had alerts like this before. Usually they mean standing in a cold garden for an hour, staring at a sky the colour of wet slate, and going back to bed feeling foolish.

This time I took the dog and walked up to the playing fields at the edge of town, where the streetlights stop. To my surprise, I was not alone. There were perhaps thirty people already there: families with children in pyjamas and coats, a couple in matching dressing gowns, a man with a tripod and a flask. Everyone was looking north. Nobody could see anything.

Then a teenager held up her phone and shrieked. On the screen, the sky above the trees was a vivid, glowing pink, streaked with green. Thirty phones went up at once. It was a strange moment: we were all standing under the real sky, and all looking at a small rectangle of it instead.

Over the next twenty minutes, though, it grew strong enough to see with our own eyes. Pale pillars of light rose from the horizon and faded and rose again, like searchlights being switched on and off behind the hills. The pink deepened to a soft crimson overhead. A small boy asked his mother if the sky was on fire, and she said, ‘No, love, it’s the sun,’ which was true, though it can hardly have helped.

The science, which I looked up the next morning, is simple enough: a burst of charged particles from the sun strikes the upper atmosphere and makes it glow. The experience was not simple at all. Strangers showed each other their photographs and swapped tips about camera settings. The man with the flask poured me a cup of tea without being asked. At midnight the colours faded, and we drifted home in twos and threes, slightly giddy, as if we had all been to the same party.

I have the photos. They are lovely. But what I remember is the moment I put my phone away and just looked up.

Text 2: The aurora of Monday night, by Thomas Thistlethwaite

An original letter to a newspaper written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter to a local newspaper, written in 1870, a man describes the night when a bright aurora was seen over his English market town.

Sir, As many of your readers will have witnessed the extraordinary appearance in the sky on Monday night, and as a good deal of foolishness has since been talked about it, I venture to send you a plain account of what I saw.

At a little after nine o’clock my servant came running in to say that there was a great fire towards Elmsley, and on going into the street I found the whole of the northern sky glowing with a deep red light, such as might indeed have come from a burning town. The bell of St Mary’s was already ringing, and the fire engine went past at full gallop with half the young men of the place running after it. It returned an hour later, I am told, having found nothing at Elmsley but a number of farmers standing in their yards, as puzzled as ourselves.

By ten the market place was full of people. The red glow had by then spread almost to the zenith, and from the northern horizon rose long rays of a pale, silvery light, which moved slowly from east to west like the spokes of a great fan. At intervals the whole heaven seemed to pulse and flicker, and the faces of the crowd were lit up with a crimson colour very strange to see.

I regret to say that not all who watched it did so calmly. Several old women declared it to be a sign of war, or of the end of the world, and one poor woman near me wept and would not be comforted. A preacher upon the steps of the Corn Exchange took the opportunity to warn us of our sins. I heard also a good deal of rough laughter from the young men, which I thought equally out of place.

The phenomenon was, of course, nothing more than the aurora borealis, or northern lights, which is seldom seen so far south, though it is common enough in the north of Scotland. It is a natural effect, connected, as I understand, with the electricity of the atmosphere. There was nothing in it to fear. I confess, however, that I stood watching it until after midnight, and that I have never seen anything so beautiful.

Both of these texts are about seeing the northern lights.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the night the northern lights appeared and how people reacted
• how the writers present these experiences to readers

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