Analysis: historic records of the aurora borealis in Irish skies survive in folklore, newspapers and scientific reports
By Dr Angela Byrne, Ulster University
The 'northern lights' or aurora borealis are visible in skies over Ireland this week as the ideal geomagnetic and weather conditions have brought the lights into view. Prior to the invention of electric lighting, people had much more exposure to astronomical phenomena – no light pollution obscured the night sky – and they developed their own ways of understanding events like the northern lights. Historic records of the aurora in Irish skies survive in folklore, newspapers and scientific reports.
A new school of enquiry into the northern lights was born in the eighteenth century thanks to a surge in auroral activity in 1715, voyages into polar regions, and Enlightenment developments in the sciences. Newspapers responded to public interest in the phenomenon; the Dublin Journal, for instance, published a letter from Cork describing a 'most surprizing' aurora of 30 January 1749 that ‘was tinged so deep a scarlet, that it looked as if the city was in flames’.
In 1788 the Irish astronomer and mathematician Reverend Henry Ussher was of the impression that the aurora was ‘certainly more common now than it was a century or even half a century ago; this I find most people, even the most illiterate, agreed in.’ In 1810 a writer for the Belfast Monthly Magazine stated that the aurora was ‘so well known in this country under the name of streamers, that it is unnecessary for us here to spend much time in describing it.’
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Northern Lights visible in skies over Ireland
When the Irish geologist and chemist Richard Kirwan published his monthly meteorological journal for 1788, he tried to discover whether there was a correlation between the aurora and the weather. He may have been inspired by Irish folk traditions that used the aurora as a forecasting device. These traditions endured into the twentieth century and were recorded by schoolchildren in the 1930s as part of the national folklore project. These records show that the aurora continued to be referred to as 'streamers' into the twentieth century, and that people interpreted it as a sign of coming rain, frost, or storms.
The Dublin Penny Journal published a study of the northern lights in 1833 by one J. Getty (who probably also wrote the article for the Belfast Monthly Magazine in 1810). Despite the writer’s attempts to be scientific, they asserted that ‘whoever sees it for the first time can scarcely behold it without terror.’ This remark reflects deeply embedded traditions that associated the aurora with the supernatural and the mystical. One Ardara (Co. Donegal) informant to the 1930s schools’ folklore project stated: ‘Long ago the people used to go out and search for a sort of matter which used to fall from the sky in many places after a night that there were Northern Lights seen in the sky. This was said to be a cure for a burn.’
Fascination with the aurora continued to grow in the nineteenth century, fueled by British commercial interest in the Northwest Passage, European settlement in Canada, and a sudden increase in auroral activity in 1827. Descriptions of remarkable auroras became more frequent in the press, some lyrical and emotive, some attempting to quantify a little-understood, variable and subjective phenomenon. Scientists investigated whether the aurora could be used to generate electricity, or whether it really made a crackling sound as some claimed.
From National Geographic, time lapse video shows spectacular Northern Lights in Norway
Observers tried to capture in words the aurora's rapid yet subtle movements, its stunning yet almost-imperceptible colour changes. Crossing the Atlantic in 1830, Derry-born migrant merchant David Blair Little described his experience: '[the aurora] broke fantastically from behind the white border of a cloud in lucid, transparent columns, giving a lustre to the stars, danced about, assumed a thousand shapes, flitted from place to place, vanished rapidly, returned […] they exhibit bright and rapidly evolving hues, emitting pale coruscations which undulate upwards amid streaks of yellow and red, shooting across the zenith’.
In August–September 1859, a massive solar storm generated magnificent aurora across the northern hemisphere, its magnetic force was such that it brought down telegraph services in Ireland and elsewhere. Another major aurora took place in 1938, with Irish newspapers reporting the vivid displays as well as the disturbance caused to the Post Office’s radio-telephone services.
The aurora continued to confound scientific explanation until the 1950s, when technological advancements and the ‘space race’ gave scientists the tools to understand its origins in the sun. During periods of high solar activity, sunspots form and produce coronal mass ejections containing massive amounts of energy and travelling at thousands of kilometres per second. These streams of charged particles are colourless and invisible until they interact with atoms in Earth’s magnetic field: oxygen generates red and green aurora; nitrogen gives rise to green and blue.
The same phenomenon occurs in the southern hemisphere: the first European to describe the aurora australis was Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain James Cook’s South Pacific expedition of 1768–1771.
I have been fortunate enough to observe the aurora in three different countries and I know the basics of the science – but every time, all I see is cosmic music.
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Dr Angela Byrne is a historian and Research Associate at Ulster University.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
