AURORA ABOVE THE NORTH YORK MOORS!

We noticed the skies were forecast clear on Saturday, so we decided to go on a little celestial adventure. After gathering our equipment together and planning for a location to watch the moonrise, we zoomed off to some nearby fields.

We had a wonderful time watching a beautiful sunset, the moon looked incredible rising above the castle with its fiery orange hue, and as the skies began to darken we decided to go on a little adventure across the North York Moors.

We ended up heading to the North York Moors via small back roads on the countryside of which we'd never been on before. It was a lovely journey, watching the post sunset skies turn into twilight and watching the stars begin to emerge as the skies slowly darkened. We saw lots of beautiful villages, churches and lots of wildlife on route including many bunnies, hares and bats.

The moors are looking gorgeous right now, and even in the dark you can see how lovely and purple the heather is.

Once we arrived, we set up our cameras and strategically placed them to capture the darkest point of the sky, around 45 degrees away from the Perseid meteor shower radiant, with our back to the Moon and towards the North for the Northern Lights.

It was a lovely evening. Initially some clouds looked like they might spoil our views, but they soon passed by and we were treated to beautifully clear skies, views of the stars, asterisms, constellations, star clusters, planets, countless meteors blazing across the sky including several Perseid fireballs and to add to this later in the evening we even caught some pink aurora rays stretching above the clouds towards the Plough.

This is the second night in a row we've caught aurora and the third time so far this month. It has been a bit of a challenge with the bright moon and while the space weather stats have been fairly elevated, the timings of solar wind arrival have been typically favouring those across the pond. But with a bit of with patience and perseverance, staying out for several hours each night from dusk to dawn we managed to capture the little flurries we were treated to.

We were also treated to gorgeous views of planets throughout this evening. The ringed planet Saturn looking beautiful all evening in the constellation of Pisces. As the dawn twilight approached a stunning planetary duo - the bright planet Venus and the gas giant Jupiter rose in unison from the North Eastern horizon. It is so wonderful to see the planets back in our evening and early morning skies. 😍

We ended up making a couple of stops on the way home admiring Jupiter and Venus reflecting in the beautiful river Esk and then we went on a little drive close to home by the sea, with the planetary duo rising out to sea above the glistening ocean with the backdrop of the silhouetted castle and headland as the pre-dawn twilight skies set in. A lovely little drive before eventually heading home at around 5.30am.

All in all, it was a magical evening full of wildlife and celestial treats. We had a wonderful time as did Luna getting to explore lots of places for walkies throughout the evening. It is great to have the dark skies back, and we can't wait until the next new moon.

We captured thousands of photographs with several cameras shooting all throughout the evening. Overall, we captured over 300gb worth of photographs! Including images of lots of meteors and the brief flurries of Aurora that managed to shine through the moonlight. In our previous post, we shared an image of some of the meteors we captured on this evening. Here is a second image from this special celestial adventure, if you want to view the first image, please see our previous post.

In this second image, you can see some bright and colourful pink Auroral rays stretching above the clouds towards the Northern horizon, we hope you like it!

If you have been out in the night recently, we would love to hear about your celestial adventures, so please feel free to share any of your adventures in the comments below. 🥰💖