Time for some inter-stellar Geography for those of you who thought Geographers only had our heads stuck in Earthly rocks and soil.
In October some areas of the UK saw the most spectacular display of Northern lights ever to grace the skies of the British Isles. But the reason I can’t see them right now outside my flat in Manchester doesn’t have anything to do with not being far enough North (we are as Northern as we like to think) it’s light pollution from the city I and hundreds upon thousands of others live in. We can easily forget the billions of stars that should be in our nightly lives, even if the sky is clear when you look up into the urban night there is nothing twinkling back, apart from the EJ989 to Malaga.
For millennia humanity and Geographers have been staring into the universe, trying to understand our existence through the stars, they’ve been used to determine whether we really are at the centre of the universe, deciphered to guide lost ships home and entrenched in ancient mythology. But now we’ve obscured this window into another way of thinking from our own view in major cities and towns, I can’t help but think we’re blocking something from our natural, instinctive Geographer, our understanding of the universe we live in and perspective on our own planet.
When you go out to the countryside it seems almost impossible not to let your mind wander into thoughts of how small we are, how we can’t possibly be the only planet to sustain life and what those aliens are doing with their spare time. And every now and again just ‘isn’t that sky beautiful?’ I know I’m not revealing a mystery, but the loss of the night sky is a consequence of our modern civilisation we rarely consider, maybe we’d all think a bit clearer for seeing Venus set in the evening or The Plough rise at night. I know I would.
For those of us in Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield that missed out on the Northern Lights last month due to street lights and office blocks here they are over Derwent Water in the Lake District.
Credit: Paul Kingston/Arctic-Images/Getty Images
Amazingly they’re not the only ones of their kind; the Aurora Australis illuminate the Southern Pole as rays from the sun dance through our atmosphere in a place we don’t visit very often as a species. There aren’t many humans in Antarctica to take pictures or write Wikipedia articles, I don’t know about you but I like it that way, it’s wonderful that our world still holds some mystery and we just can’t reach it. (Luckily the International Space Station can though http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14998679)
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