This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about our Octoberfest trip that is coming up later this year.

And I suddenly wondered whether we might have a chance of seeing the Aurora while we're there.

Partly because one of the places will be staying, seems like it will have maybe not as much

light pollution as where I live, and also partly because I have a really hard time

visualizing how far north things are on other continents, unless I'm actually looking at a

globe.

The answer is that the Aurora chances are roughly comparable to being at home in Massachusetts,

which means unlikely but not impossible.

The only time I have seen the Aurora, I was in my own yard at home.

So that's in spite of having tried to see them in Iceland.

Well, we were there that didn't work out.

During my quest to get an answer to that question, though, I stumbled across a reference to the Carrington event.

And then a couple of weeks later, the Carrington event came up again in a video game that I was playing.

And I thought, should that be an episode? The Carrington event was a massive geomagnetic storm that happened in 1859, and in some

ways, it strikes me as a story of serendipity. Most people who experienced the Carrington event saw an Aurora, including lots of

people who lived in places where auroras do not normally appear. Although the words Aurora Borealis and

...