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The forecasters predicted it and you were there with your mobiles and cameras ready to capture one of nature’s most stunning spectacles.
A great selection of amazing shots of the Northern Lights came flooding in to Grimsby Live, showing the extraordinary and other-worldly display of glowing colours over the northern Lincolnshire area. The Northern Lights, also known as aurora borealis, appear as large areas of colour including pale green, pink, shades of red, yellow, blue and violet in the direction due north, says the Met Office.
During a weak aurora, the colours are very faint and spread out whereas an intense aurora features greater numbers of and brighter colours which can be seen higher in the sky with a distinct arc. The Lights are best seen in darkness, away from any light pollution and generally extend from 50 miles to as high as 400 miles above the Earth’s surface.
They are caused when charged particles from solar wind colliding with molecules in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Met Office adds: “When the magnetic polarity of the solar wind is opposite to the Earth’s magnetic field, the two magnetic fields combine allowing these energetic particles to flow into the Earth’s magnetic north and south poles.”
Though auroras are typically centred around the magnetic poles, the arrival of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun can cause the band where they normally occur – called an annulus – to expand to lower latitudes as was the case on Thursday evening.
With an alert yesterday that the conditions were ideal for the Northern Lights to be clearly visible in lots of areas last night, weather-watchers across the region turned their focus skywards to capture this stunning selection of pictures and we thank all our followers for sharing them.
READ MORE: Find all the latest weather news for the northern Lincolnshire area
