REPORTAGE – It has been two winters since the Northern Lights have appeared in the French sky. Blame it on the Sun reaching the peak of its activity. An ideal opportunity for space meteorologists to refine their forecasts and anticipate the risks that geomagnetic storms may pose to our increasingly connected societies.
Amateur astrophotographers and enthusiasts of celestial phenomena were ready. For several days already, they had all had their eyes glued to apps and sites dedicated to the quest for the Northern Lights. Among them, our reporter Olivier Grunewald. The alert came out on May 10 at 6 p.m.: a particularly violent and rapid solar wind was going to come straight to Earth. Olivier jumped on his camera bag and left Paris, its lights and its light pollution.
Direction an area of black sky, as close as possible. At 9:30 p.m., he stopped along a small road in Normandy, at Bellou-le-Trichard, aimed for the silhouette of two trees in the distance as a backdrop and sped off. “Hardly installed, I began to see fluorescent lights appear with the naked eye, enlivening the dark sky,” remembers the photographer, while his camera sensor recorded a bluish-green ribbon slowly undulating on the horizon.
Very quickly, pillars…
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