Northern Lights in Salzburg

I saw the northern lights for the very first time last year on a winter trip to Norway. Having briefly seen them shimmering in the night sky over Tromsø, it was a few days later on the little island of Sommarøy with clear skies and the right KP index and levels of solar wind that we got to witness the majesty of one of the world's greatest natural phenomenons dancing across the clear skies.

We used the My Aurora Forecast app to track when the best possibilities for spotting them might be. The feeling of seeing them light up the entire sky with ripples and waves of pulsing green light was an experience I will never, ever forget.

So, when the news came out that a severe solar storm was due to send the aurora borealis and the aurora australis dancing across skies around the globe, with sightings possible from places so south they'd never before been in the path of the lights... I had to take the chance to see if I could spot this phenomenon once again.

Living in Salzburg, we're usually pretty lucky with clear skies, low light pollution and brilliant star sightings as we're a small city tucked into the mountains of Austria. So I bundled up, grabbed my camera and tripod and rode my bike a ways south of the city along the river to get out of the street light pollution.

They weren't incredibly strong with the naked eye, mostly just shimmers of pink above the Gaisberg, but my camera caught some serious magic: