Capturing Northern Lights with my phone from an airplane — a chance encounter?

This was during my recent flight from Toronto to New Delhi. It was after dinner, when I paused my re-watch of ‘Before Sunrise’ on the plane, and got lost in thought about how I tend to see beauty in the most mundane of things. I was looking at the plane around me, the fact that I was literally sitting on a comfortable chair in a flying tube 10000 meters above northern Canada. The flight was around half it’s capacity, and most people were asleep by then. I didn’t know anyone on that plane, but we were experiencing this thing together and how easily it had become mundane. The fact that we were flying, getting our meals and beverages served, feeling safe enough to comfortably fall asleep. The fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic, wearing masks, and constantly sanitizing our hands at every other instance of external contact. How mundane it had become, and how beautiful still!

Or maybe the appreciation of beauty is a very subjective thing, and it is an experience I could not replicate or communicate in someone else’s mind. I wondered why it was so that I have felt this most of my life. What was the reason I saw the world this way, and if it’s something worth communicating and sharing with people. For me, this is my life. This is how I see the world. So it’s hard for me to guess how someone else would think of this. Maybe it’s just too obvious for some of them, or maybe they never even got to this state when they paused and appreciated existence for the sake of existence. I took out my iPad from my bag and started scribbling a few thoughts along these lines, but what followed was intense enough for me to be looking at all of that only as a build-up to what happened next. After writing about a page or so, my thoughts branched out to several other things. That’s when I looked outside the window, and I could see some stars, mostly interrupted by the reflection of the lights inside the plane. I remembered my first picture of a starry night from a plane around 20 months ago, when I was on my way to Canada for the first time. I had clicked it using my phone. So I decided to click a picture again. I knew it would look mostly the same, but thought it was a good moment for some stars. All moments are good for some stars! I tried clicking a couple of shots with my phone and the reflections kept interrupting the picture. After 2 or 3 takes, I figured out a way to block all the light from the inside using the window shade and kept my phone steady against the window, holding it with my hands for long exposures of 30 seconds. Something had now started to reveal itself. I could not believe my eyes for what I saw in the picture.

I tweaked the settings a little bit, and held the phone steadier the next time, just to be sure. I was right! It was happening! What I saw in front of me was aurora borealis aka northern lights. I felt a lot of things at that moment. I was more stunned by the timing of it. Just when I was trying to process my thoughts about finding beauty in the mundane of things, something far away from mundane had happened. Something absolutely unexpected. Almost everyone on the plane in my sight was asleep. I felt an urge to share. It was too much to be experiencing alone. I stopped an air-hostess passing by and showed her the picture on my phone. I was expecting to hear a response like it was a usual thing to happen, and that she was glad I noticed it. To my surprise, she was blown away equally, if not more. So much so that she tried to peek out of my window and the reflections certainly blocked her view, considering the ‘social-distance’ we had to keep. She left to share it with her crew, and look outside from her own window. Cameras certainly capture a lot more than naked eyes would allow though due to their capability of doing long exposures. I sat there processing the fact that this had happened. I looked at it, when I easily could have missed it. But I didn’t! It was happening, and I was a part of it.

I was emotional. I thought I might cry. Though the tears didn’t show up, the memory of that feeling will always be imprinted in me. I was in touch with the purity of my thoughts, and how they keep gifting things when I really don’t desire for more. Just being an observer in this universe, at any point in space-time, reveals beauty in whatever is being observed, long as the intention of the observation is pure. Life, I think, is an opportunity to conceive beauty. Beauty does not exist after it, or before it. Life gives meaning to beauty. And beauty probably is just the feeling of fascination, an admiration of something that feels like a work of art. And isn’t existence fascinating enough? I sat there looking outside the window, staring at the wing of the plane cutting through this haze, with a little smile on my face. I think it was a perfect closing thought for what I had begun writing.

If you see beauty in the most mundane of things, you would inevitably arrive at these serendipities, just because you were looking when everyone else was fast asleep.

Thank you for reading!