The aurora hunt begins tonight

(Photos of the diary entry can be found at the end of the text).

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I check the new Aurora app in Terra. “She’s supposed to show herself at 2 a.m.,” I say. “2:00 a.m.? Oh dear. Can you wake me up?” asks Tanja, who doesn’t like getting up at night. “Sure, but you have to get up when I wake you.” “I’ll try. I definitely will.” “We’ll see,” I reply with a smile, as I’ve known my Tanja for over 32 years. After dinner, I charge the batteries of our headlamps and cameras. Then I familiarize myself with the operation of my backup camera, which I haven’t used for a long time. “Better safe than sorry”, I think to myself. I play through a few settings with the main camera: Exposure 10 seconds, Iso automatic, distance manual, interval release. “I hope that works.” I’ve been told that you can usually only see the aurora borealis through the camera. Tanja is already lying in her cozy bed and sleeping soundly. It’s 11.00 pm. I take another look outside to see if anything is happening with the other two motorhomes that are also parked here. Nothing, everything is quiet. “Maybe they’re not interested in the Northern Lights either,” I think to myself. I set my arm computer to 24:00 and go to bed too. Before I pull up the comforter, I open a window again and look outside. “Something’s stirring,” I say quietly, get up, get dressed again and step out into the night. Our neighbors shine their flashlights around. I look up at the night sky and can’t see anything with the best will in the world, not even with a lot of imagination. “Will she even show herself to us?” I ponder and go back to bed, a little disappointed. Beep! Beep! Beep! My watch wakes me up at midnight. Having just slept for half an hour, I struggle to get up. Since I don’t know whether there’s really anything to see out there, I let Tanja go back to sleep. I grab my camera and leave the Terra for the umpteenth time. Apart from a few suspicious streaks in the firmament, nothing is visible. “Is that Aurora?” I ask myself, click my camera onto the tripod and try to take a photo. Suddenly the long exposure doesn’t work. “What kind of shit is that?” I curse and go through the different settings. As my fingers get cold, I get back into our heated mobile. I spend 20 minutes trying to find the fault and get more and more nervous, because when I look out of the window, there are actually bright stripes across the night sky. Because the long exposure still doesn’t work, I put the camera to one side and grab my spare camera, on which I put the good lens. I quickly rush outside, click the camera onto the tripod and take a few shots. Nervously, I look into the camera’s viewfinder, call up the memory function and can’t believe what I see. “Aurora! Fantastic! Yes! Yes! Yes!” I shout, run a few meters further and take more pictures. “Wonderful!” I shout enthusiastically and hurry to Terra. “Tanja wake up!” “What’s going on?” “The aurora is here!” “What?” “Northern lights! Northern lights! They’re here! Hurry up!” I shout, close the door again and sprint back to my camera. A car shoots up the nearby road and speeds into our parking lot. The door bursts open and a Norwegian gets out with his camera. “Aurora hunter,” runs through my brain. Suddenly Tanja is standing next to me. “You actually got up,” I say happily. “I’m not going to miss out on that,” she laughs. “Look in the viewfinder,” I ask her. “Wow! Fantastic.” “And look up there.” “There it is.” “Yes, the bright stripes. That’s the aurora. It’s the electrically charged particles of the solar winds colliding with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere about 90 to 150 kilometers above our heads,” I enthuse. “So beautiful. Beautiful,” Tanja admires the constantly changing white, greenish and bluish bands and veils of light that arch over the bay from the dark cliffs in the North Sea and disappear again on the other side between two angular mountain peaks. “Absolutely. A special moment in our lives,” I agree. “Come on, let’s go down to the beach,” I suggest, whereupon our headlamps show us the way through the rocks, over a small bubbling mountain stream to the beach. Ajaci is happy about the night-time hike, jumps alongside us like a young chamois, licks at the fresh, cold mountain water of the stream, jumps over the cold sand of the beach, plays with the waves that gently lap at our feet with a lush splash not far from us. “Run up to the waves and shine your headlamp into the sky. That will certainly make a good picture,” Tanja suggests. I lean my head back and see the cosmic lime-green tail above me, behind which the Milky Way stretches out in the indefinable blue of space, in which billions of stars sparkle like diamonds. What a gift. A gift from God, whoever and whatever God is. But these moments are indescribable, incredibly exhilarating and incomparably better than any fireworks display I have ever seen in my life. However, I don’t want to make a comparison and the auroras would be rightly offended if they were compared to human fireworks. We walk along the long beach, listen to the waves and gaze up at a starry sky that rarely exists on our planet due to light pollution. “Ohhh!”, I shout in shock as the tail end of a wave washes over our shoes during a shot. “Ha, ha, ha!” we laugh at this, as if it were a joke that Mother Nature has played on us. We happily leave the beach, climb up to the road, set up the tripod and take photos of ourselves on the asphalt strip that disappears into the darkness of the night. “Yes, that’s good. That looks great. Do that again. And now look up at the sky. Switch on the headlamp. Super! Perfect!” we cheer each other on. The slowly increasing engine noise announces a car. Suddenly it comes around the bend, splits the night with its headlights, splits the road, howls, rushes past us until the tail lights fill the previously split asphalt strip with red lava, at least for a fraction of a second. It is a night of superlatives, an unforgettable night in which, for the first time in our lives, we are confronted and gifted with the cosmic play of lights of a strange world. And so the hours pass. There is no tiredness, because our senses are whipped up and screaming with happiness. I set up the camera again and again. When carrying the tripod, I can no longer feel the tripod legs burning into my hands with their coldness. I can’t feel how my hands and fingers are slowly going numb, how the feeling is disappearing more and more. At 3:30 a.m., the play of lights above our heads slowly fades. We don’t want to go, even though it would be sensible, until Tanja wakes me from my trance and suggests that we go back to Terra. “Okay,” I say buoyantly, as if I’m on a little high. My hands suddenly start to tingle in the Terra. It gets stronger and stronger, almost unbearable. Then my hands, now fiery red, start to itch as if I’ve stuck them in an anthill. “I think I’ve frozen my hands,” I say, having sobered up again. “Please don’t make jokes.” “No no kidding, but it’s not bad,” I tell her holding lukewarm water to thaw her out. Fortunately, the itching stops half an hour later. We are lying in bed and can’t sleep, we are so upset. We’re still inspired by the rush of happiness. We are absolutely aware of what we were allowed to experience, how blessed we were, and I am sure that we will take this night with us into the next life as an unforgettable experience…