A Passion For Space

The Sky at Night  presenter is blown away by her first aurora – much like the particles that cause them.

- Maggie Aderin-Pocock

The past few years I have spent working on The Sky at Night have been a privilege and it has led to some incredible opportunities: reporting on the descent of the Philae lander onto Comet 67P; being present at NASA as New Horizons flew past Pluto, and discussing some of the first images that the probe returned; and, this year, I was able to fulfil a childhood dream of seeing the Northern Lights.

We looked into a number of options to hunt down the aurora borealis. They can be seen from northern Scotland, but the probability of seeing them so far south is low. Flying north from Leeds on a dedicated ‘aurora flight’ was also considered, but in the end we settled on a visit to Tromsø, a Norwegian town high in the Arctic Circle amongst the fjords. With an 80 per cent chance of seeing the Northern Lights from there, it was definitely our best shot.