The night before, I had managed to miss a rather impressive aurora display for a very simple reason: I noticed the messages in our astronomy group too late.
By the time I realised what was happening outside, there wasn’t much left for me to do except look at everyone else’s photos and be slightly annoyed with myself.
After missing January 19, I definitely wasn’t going to make that mistake twice. So on January 20, I was prepared.
I kept an eye on the sky and the updates much earlier in the evening, and when aurora activity started showing up again, I didn’t wait around for long. I grabbed my camera equipment, got into the car and headed out of town to find a darker view towards the north.
This time, I was there in time.
The aurora wasn’t necessarily the same display I had missed the night before, but it was clearly visible in the photographs, with reddish and purplish structures stretching across the northern sky.
Aurora from northern Germany is always a bit unpredictable. Sometimes there is plenty of activity and nothing makes it through the clouds or light pollution; sometimes you only realise afterwards that something was happening at all.