B.C. sky gazers treated to rare 'double header' of northern lights and meteor shower

It’s been an exciting few days for sky gazers, with the Perseid meteor shower and the northern lights visible in some parts of the province.

Some of the pictures of the northern lights from Vancouver Island over the weekend are breathtaking.

And a shot from the North Shuswap managed to capture a part of the Perseid meteor shower and the northern lights all in one go.

“Any auroral event in Vancouver is extremely rare,” said sky gazer and former physics teacher Peter Vogel. “Any auroral event close to the 49th (parallel) here is relatively rare. To have a double header is the rarest of the rare, shall we say.”

Unfortunately, many parts of Metro Vancouver had cloud that disrupted getting much of a clear view.

But a photo out of White Rock shows there were areas locally that got a great look.

“It’s basically like a big burp coming from the sun, where you have magnetic field lines that are breaking and they’re spewing out charged particles into space,” said Rosanna Tilbrook with the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. “Now when they interact with Earth’s atmosphere, its magnetosphere and then its atmosphere, that causes all these pretty lights in the sky.”

“It’s basically the charged particles doing a dance up in the sky.”

The show over the last few days brought up memories of that great display of aurora borealis we got in May – which was visible in Vancouver.

“It hit G4 level this morning, which is a notch down from what we had in May which was really the once-in-a-lifetime event for Vancouverites,” Vogel said. “So yeah, if you were on a ferry last night, people got to see it, just across the border, and I believe it went down as far south as maybe Colorado for naked eye visibility.”

And over the next couple of nights, there’s a chance you might be able to catch some of the meteor shower, but you might have to venture out a bit.

“So if you can get further away from the city or maybe somewhere it isn’t going to be cloudy, that would be ideal,” Tilbrook said. “But unfortunately if it is cloudy that’s going to pose a bit of a problem.”

And if you are trying to catch part of the meteor shower, experts say you should get to your viewing spot half an hour before to let your eyes adjust.