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Merged Here comes another Aurora Borealis

steve s said:
When I saw this thread about 30 minutes ago, I went outside and saw a red glow to the north. There was one spot that was pretty bright. If I hadn't seen this thread I might have dismissed it as being caused by a shopping center that's to the north of me. But the glow only lasted about 10 minutes, so that means it was probably the aurora. The shopping center is lit throughout the night.

How long does a display like this last?

Steve S
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It can be as brief as a few minutes to as long as a couple hours. That's one reason it's hard to see the aurora as far south as Seattle. We had clear skies most of the night but no aurora whenever I looked, and I looked often throughout the night. Sigh....

From the storm record Oct 24-25, there was a brief display once in the middle of the night that would have been visible here. But it's hard to spend the whole night watching and I missed it. Sigh....


But I'm glad to hear the thread was useful for you. Yes, sometimes a red or pink or green glow is all one can see. If you do see that glow, it's worth watching for a while if you can because often there will be a flareup and you'll see columns of light reaching up into the sky. And if it is really a big aurora or one is closer to the poles, the columns will wave like ribbons in the wind.

Last night's aurora was visible across much of the east coast of the US and at one point visible as far south as Oklahoma, Georgia and Arkansas! The news has some great videos this morning of the sky flashing red. From Spaceweather.com today with links to images from each state:
Auroras were seen or photographed in more than half of all US states including Alabama, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Maryland, New York, Montana, Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Arkansas and California. Many observers, especially in the deep south, commented on the pure red color of the lights they saw. These rare all-red auroras sometimes appear during intense geomagnetic storms.
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I saw the red glow with some streaks last night at 2130 here in Shortsville NY. It stretched about two thirds of the sky, nearly directly overhead. Pretty intense.It then faded and the clouds rolled in.
 
If it's dark where you are:
HIGH-LATITUDE AURORAS: The Arctic Circle is alight with auroras following this morning's CME impact. Incoming reports from Russia, Denmark, Scotland, England, and Norway confirm a bright apparition underway now.
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Nothing here. (56N 3W approx). Very clear earlier, but high , thin cloud. Front coming in.
Last night was very clear , but all I saw was Venus , Jupiter and some flying saucers.
 
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Well, an even bigger blast is on it's way. We have clear skies but it's low odds the blast and clear skies will match up:
RADIATION STORM IN PROGRESS: Solar protons accelerated by this morning's M9-class solar flare are streaming past Earth. On the NOAA scale of radiation storms, this one ranks S3, which means it could, e.g., cause isolated reboots of computers onboard Earth-orbiting satellites and interfere with polar radio communications. An example of satellite effects: The "snow" in this SOHO coronagraph movie is caused by protons hitting the observatory's onboard camera.

ALMOST-X FLARE AND CME (UPDATED): This morning, Jan. 23rd around 0359 UT, big sunspot 1402 erupted, producing a long-duration M9-class solar flare. The explosion's M9-ranking puts it on the threshold of being an X-flare, the most powerful kind. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare's extreme ultraviolet flash...

...The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft detected a CME rapidly emerging from the blast site: movie. Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab say the leading edge of the CME will reach Earth on Jan. 24 at 14:18UT (+/- 7 hours). Their animated forecast track shows that Mars is in the line of fire, too; the CME will hit the Red Planet during the late hours of Jan. 25.

This is a relatively substantial and fast-moving (2200 km/s) CME. Spacecraft in geosynchronous, polar and other orbits passing through Earth's ring current and auroral regions could be affected by the cloud's arrival. In addition, strong geomagnetic storms are possible, so high-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
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Space Weather Alerts
 
it could, e.g., cause isolated reboots of computers onboard Earth-orbiting satellites and interfere with polar radio communications.
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Well that might explain why communications are so dodgy down in Antarctica right now. My husband is down there at the moment and has been having issues with comms-- he thought it was perhaps the heavy snow that they're getting, but this seems more likely.
 
Well, the CME impact was at 10am PST. But sigh, there'll be more. The solar minimum ended a while back and we haven't reached solar max yet (11 year cycles).
 
volcano said:
Well that might explain why communications are so dodgy down in Antarctica right now. My husband is down there at the moment and has been having issues with comms-- he thought it was perhaps the heavy snow that they're getting, but this seems more likely.
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Yes, there was considerable radio interference. Right now there are level 4 auroras going on.


BTW, the solar weather alert website has been down all day.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It's back! Level 5 storm right now. Naturally we have clear skies but it is daytime here. :(

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/gif/pmapN.gif
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It is, naturally, cloudy (and daytime) here....

Incidentally, I was outside last night setting up my camera to get some shots to stitch together as a timelapse video.

JUST before I set up the camera, the best meteor I've seen in years streaked across the southern sky. At least as bright as Jupiter, it covered half of the sky before it broke up into at approx three pieces. I'd be surprised if some of it didn't hit the ground (or water) to the east of here.

The cloud rolled in about ten minutes after I started the camera up - so I have some interesting video of clouds racing over the house, but not much. I gave up....

:D
 
The best one I ever saw was when I lived in Sydney back in the mid-late 90s. I was playing a game on the PC in a well lit room. I caught a glimpse of something out of the window and turned my head. A bright green, readily visible fireball was falling into the sea over past the city. It lit up the sky for ages!
 
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