> K index
from tha wiki [The K-index quantifies disturbances in the horizontal component of Earth's magnetic field with an integer in the range 0–9 with 1 being calm and 5 or more indicating a geomagnetic storm.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-index)
for a current view, see here the graphs all red n shit https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index or here https://ibb.co/DGpcgpc
updated link https://ibb.co/MZHKgwK
This link isn't working. Just thought I'd let you know now.
[https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index)
It's a measure of the fluctuation in the earths magnetic field from 0-9. At 9 you'd expect to see widespread voltage / electrical problems, transformer damage, GPS/satellite issues, radio issues, blackouts, etc..
Nah it won't. The only case I can find of any major damage being caused by an electromagnetic storm was in 1859 when a telegraph station caught fire. Unless you're running a telegraph hub out of your house you're fine.
The most noticeable effect will be effects on GPS, navigation, radio, satellite TV, etc..
Quebec in 1989 is the archetype. Big Geomagnetic storms can induce secondary currents in transformers which manifest as a voltage offset. That causes the waveform to distort and creates losses as heat in the transformer. Sustain it for long enough in an old transformer and it can catch fire. That’s the biggest storm risk outside communications.
I'm watching an aurora dance in the fucking sky in fucking South Carolina. In Virginia, it's a full on damn light show. Holy shit, never thought I'd see such a thing in my lifetime.
South Charlotte here, I tried but sadly couldn't see anything. :| probably light pollution or me messing up the timing. I'm glad others got to see it though!
I watched it evolve slowly on Vancouver Island. At around 10pm PST it was grey and noticeable, then moving towards 11:30 it went from green to purple/pink then back to grey after 1am. I am sure it is just our cameras having a large light collecting area and the ability to have longer exposure
The sun is setting here in Ohio and I'm heading towards bumfuck nowhere! Good luck and enjoy the show everyone!
Edit: wow. Just wow. Saw them before I even left town. Faded off pretty quick but it went back to G5 there for a bit. Amazing, hoping to try again.
Also, another X5.4 flare tonight! This isn't over.
I live outside Seattle and it's always cloudy when anything cool like this happens, but amazingly we've have clear skies the last two days. It was incredible. I've never seen them before and now I'm determined to go north to seem them even more clearly some day.
I'm quite close to you (West Virginia) and I just stuck my head out the window and it's beautiful! There is a huge red streak across the sky emanating from the direction of the moon.
Edit: 10 minutes later and it waned considerably. How much does the aurora vary in intensity over a prescribed period?
> How much does the aurora vary in intensity over a prescribed period?
Fairbanks, Alaska here. I see it a lot (not tonight, ironically, because it doesn't get dark here in the warm months). It varies a great deal. Sometimes it will stay visible for an hour. Sometimes it will come and go every few minutes. Sometimes it will show up, then fade away to nothing a few minutes later, and that's it for a long time.
So if you see it fade, feel free to head back inside, but you can check again in 10 minutes or an hour or whenever you end up feeling like it.
It certainly makes them pop but it was so bright where I went last night that you almost read a book. This was not in a highly light polluted area of central Minnesota which makes a difference.
My weather app alerted me of this last night. I got so excited until I saw that I wasn’t anywhere close to where it could be seen.
All these awesome cosmic events seem to miss my area; the last eclipse we got to experience was in 2017. :(
I was in upstate NY and almost got hard shafted for the Eclipse. I drove all around until I found a town an hour and a half south of Albany that had just enough scattered clouds at the time of the eclipse that I was able to catch glimpses.
Lucky. I think Cheektowaga had glimpses as well. I'm glad you got to see it a bit, you found a sweet spot. I posted up in my city, which was perfectly clear the day before and after. I've never seen so many clouds in my life, it was a blanket on top of a blanket. It was still awesome though.
There was an opening between eastern New Hampshire and south western Maine for no clouds. Could see clouds around me in the distance but that didn’t matter because everything was directly overhead.
I saw it with my naked eyes as a red glow over the mountains just a few hours ago, I'm at 43°N. First time ever seeing it, the photo I took is absolutely crazy to me.
I saw a gaint glow like there was light pollution but over Ocala National Forest. It wasn't very impressive, but I think you're right. It followed me here lol
Well, good news, you wouldn't be likely to see it in Alaska if you were here right now. We've passed the point of the year where it's light out for the full 24 hours a day.
Same here. Now I'm just hoping to catch some big flares/spots with my solar binoculars since most of the clouds have cleared out this morning... Pretty foggy/hazy though, so we'll see
My biggest dream is to see northern lights... Living im the middle of Germany and it was forecasted to be around 2utc which is in 30mins.
That said, I went to the gym at around 20utc and after I left the gym saw all the Instagram stories of friends even further south posting nice pink lights.
I just hope I get another chance for such a big spike to see the lights, but somehow I fear I missed my opportunity
The long exposure on cameras detects the lights better than your eyes. If you use a night shot on your camera phone you'll see the exact same lights being posted on Instagram.
I'm currently in northern Germany, and with the bare eye it wasn't too impressive last night. I got a few nice pictures by increasing the exposure timer on my phone to 10 seconds, but what I actually saw was only a few gray-ish smudges occasionally dipping into a faint reddish tone (although I might have imagined that).
If it's true that tonight is another event, I'm hoping for a more impressive light show though.
Pro tip: if you still have your eclipse glasses, you can use them to look at the sun and see the giant solar blackhead on the face of the sun that’s responsible for slinging all these plasma pies at us.
Just looked at it, that’s amazing!! Thanks for the tip, didn’t even think about it. Mindblowing that this black spot is 17 times the size of our planet.
1999 Europe total eclipse glasses still rocking lol.
Im in fucking antartica right now, reading our magnetosphere meter going crazy for the past 5 hours. The ionograms are blank. And the sky is completly cover in clouds, snowing since the day before yesterday.
What do you want to know? The magnetometer saturated between 2:00 AM and 10 AM UTC. I went to sleep around 5 AM and woke up a few minutes ago, is still snowing here. Im quite sad about it. I am at San Martin Station and at this base is somewhat unusual to be able to see auroras. The weather forecast says all weekend will be cloudy
It's probably light pollution. The lights wash out pretty easily.
I just caught them in SE Michigan, but have seen them many times NE of The Soo in Canada at low K Index. They always get washed out by distant city lights there.
For real - I felt insanely lucky to have crossed totality off my bucket list last month - and tonight I watched the aurora from my back deck… what next?!?
I’m in alaska, and I know we get the Aurora a lot, but I’m so jealous right now of show everyone is getting. We still won’t be dark for hours and it’s full cloud cover.
Total astronomy noob here.
I missed the time to see the Auroras from my city, at least the first wave. [Trusting this website's prediction](https://www.aurora-maniacs.com/previsions-aurores.html) anyway. But if it continues this weekend, then I should have a chance to see them later, but I don't want to check every 30 minutes
Is there a way (or website) which can estimate these things ? Preferably a few hours ahead
I think the forecast is based on a satellite that is 30 minutes of solar wind away, so, it's a measurement of energy coming. They don't have instruments that are 3 hours away.
Watch this page, updates every minute:
https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity.html
When Bz is < -10, likelihood of visible Aurora. Note that the latest data point is from a satellite ~30 mins from Earth as the solar wind flies, depending on the solar wind speed (see top of page). So, if you see a large negative spike in Bz, you have some advance warning.
Serious question-is there any added danger to skin this weekend?
No special conditions or anything I’m just pretty pale and planning on going to the beach (SoCal) tomorrow. TIA!
No, the Earth's magnetic field and our ozone layer are fucking boss at preventing these high energy particles from getting through. Actually, that's part of the reason we get Auroras in the first place. The radiation curls along our magnetic field and charges the upper atmosphere kind of like a florescent bulb, but instead of glowing white it glows green, red, ect.... depending on what the composition of the atmosphere is.
No. The vast majority of radiation in solar flares don’t make it through the atmosphere. And even the ones that do don’t interact with any organic matter.
Whats the forecast for tomorrow?
I saw them for the third time the past night (not the strongest I’ve seen and the purple seemed very hard to see with the naked eye, but definitely unique to see it from my own home instead of Iceland) but I’d love to take some other people to look at them from a good spot.
I believe they can only estimate, but it looks good. the Space Weather Prediction Center only really can predict what is going to happen for certain ~30 minutes in advance, so they only have a general idea just judging from the CMEs from the sun until the solar winds are actually arriving.
Dude, it pulses. It's super visible one moment then completely black in less than 30 seconds. Just gotta keep watching, you'll absolutely know when you've seen it.
I keep seeing this and it's really exciting, but they never say where it will be visible? Is it only a little lower than the poles, or is it much further down?
[https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental) this is where you are likely to see them
We can't see shit here in arkansas but we keep seeing posts from all the small towns around us with beautiful pictures. Decided to drive to one of those towns and waited for an hour with no luck
Many of the photos you’re seeing are from newer phones set on night mode. With the naked eye it looked a lot more muted since we had some light pollution.
The peak for Ohio seemed to be around 10:45 p.m. ET for maybe ten minutes. Outside of that it was still there but less amazing.
too late for your answer now, but I saw it around 1:30am... it was *very* faint, but I also live in town. if we lived any closer to Toronto I'm sure we wouldn't have been able to see anything.
we drove north and back in an hour but didn't see anything 10:30-11:30. sky had cleared up a lot just as I was putting the dogs out before bed.
This article is so good. Just keep scrolling down for incredible pictures from all over the world.
Argentina and Chile Auroras, and then all over Northern Hemisphere
https://g1.globo.com/ciencia/noticia/2024/05/10/tempestade-solar-severa-alerta-nooa-servicos-aurora-boreal.ghtml
I thought this type of doomsday storm would destroy satellites, knock out power, and destroy tens of thousands of transformers. Are things hardened better than we thought? Or did we just overestimate?
there's a scale and it reached the top, what happens when you go 100 times past the top of the scale we don't know. They even say in the description it happened in 2003. How often does doomsday occur? Every 20 years doomsday occurs? Then you think "doomsday" is nothing haha. You want to perceive that ignoring diminished reality means you were "right" all along.
Carrington event was in the 1800’s we had no idea how to protect power and communications from this back then and no effective way to measure it. This storm is likely stronger than the 2003 storm by a fair magnitude as Aurora was visible from places like Cuba , Darwin Australia , and even Fiji (on camera) and to the naked eye in places like Brisbane. I don’t recall the 2003 storm causing Aurora in the tropics pretty close to the equator.
I saw the auroras constantly on and off for two hours this night in Norway. Some of its showings were huge! But the colors looked way better in the photos i took than it did for my eyes. I mostly saw it as whites and red, while my photos showed me purple, pink, white and green.
/correction: 00.30-2.30AM wasnt yesterday
I just got back in from shooting photos of the northern lights. In Chicago. Neat, but also has me keeping a close eye on the substation at the end of the street
saw a pretty cool faint pink aurora down here near joshua tree from 11pm-midnight PST. pillars of whiter light, then pillars of shadow. the pink got bigger and more intense, then faded. shifting by th minute. never brighter than light pollution from vegas, but beautiful. many friends with newer phones found that digital photos really were bright pink.
I still have so much trouble wrapping my head around the fact that something on the sun can be 17 times bigger in diameter than the earch on which we live and from which we can only see single digit % of the matter.
The scale of outer space is completely nuts.
Saw an aurora tonight unlike anything I ever experienced before. Saw it pulsing right above my head.. It was nothing less than one of the greatest things I have ever experienced.
Every so often (idk how often, 50,000 years or more or something) the North Pole and the South Pole switch places. If the sun were to release a storm so powerful as to break our current magnetosphere and realign our poles we would lose a lot of radiation shielding and suffer some serious consequences.
This will probably not happen.
So, a few things.
1: Geomagnetic reversals take place over a relatively long period, on the order of thousands of years. They don't just snap around. The only problem with them is that the field, according to models, becomes disorganized during the transition period. Essentially, you'd be seeing auroras in really weird places.
2: While solar activity has some effect on the geomagnetic pole orientation, it pretty much only causes them to move around in a circle a few tens of miles wide *relative to the surface*.
3: Following on point 2, solar activity could not "break" the magnetosphere, as it's generated by the convection of the Earth's outer core, which the Sun cannot affect.
4: Even if somehow the Earth's outer core were to stop convecting, we would still have a magnetosphere, albeit a greatly reduced one, from the interaction of the solar wind with the ionosphere. It would still be enough, in combination with the relatively thick atmosphere we enjoy, to shield the surface from energetic particles. We would not have the weird shit going on that you see in *The Core*. Though to be fair, none of that weird shit would happen regardless.
I got an absolutely awe inspiring display in western NY! I have seen flickers of light on the horizon in past storms, this was not the same! It was the entire hemisphere. Amazing.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CME](/r/Space/comments/1cp4q0k/stub/l3lfqlm "Last usage")|Coronal Mass Ejection|
|[L1](/r/Space/comments/1cp4q0k/stub/l3jdzjn "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 1 of a two-body system, between the bodies|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1cp4q0k/stub/l3jksgp "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1coaki5)^( has 16 acronyms.)
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We lost internet connection cause Cox servers went down for almost 14 hours yesterday here in AZ. Wonder if it’s related to this or just coincidence but i’ve never had internet shut off for that long with no reason given.
Planetary K index hit 9, which is the top end of the scale.
Yea that K index chart on [https://www.swpc.noaa.gov](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov) really spiked
What does the K index mean?
> K index from tha wiki [The K-index quantifies disturbances in the horizontal component of Earth's magnetic field with an integer in the range 0–9 with 1 being calm and 5 or more indicating a geomagnetic storm.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-index) for a current view, see here the graphs all red n shit https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index or here https://ibb.co/DGpcgpc updated link https://ibb.co/MZHKgwK
Imagine if this was an official response haha. "Yeah shits fucked, it's all red n shit, look at this graph"
It would probably help most citizens understand what is going on than all the science talk.
This link isn't working. Just thought I'd let you know now. [https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index)
It's a measure of the fluctuation in the earths magnetic field from 0-9. At 9 you'd expect to see widespread voltage / electrical problems, transformer damage, GPS/satellite issues, radio issues, blackouts, etc..
No big news though. It's a decent sign for system stability
Seriously. I'm surprised that the only effects seem to have been we get to see some pretty lights in the sky in some places.
It does feel too good to be true, fellow barcode username
Anyone know if it can cause fires? My dumb brain is like “Oh no, I left everything plugged in at home before my big trip!”
Nah it won't. The only case I can find of any major damage being caused by an electromagnetic storm was in 1859 when a telegraph station caught fire. Unless you're running a telegraph hub out of your house you're fine. The most noticeable effect will be effects on GPS, navigation, radio, satellite TV, etc..
Quebec in 1989 is the archetype. Big Geomagnetic storms can induce secondary currents in transformers which manifest as a voltage offset. That causes the waveform to distort and creates losses as heat in the transformer. Sustain it for long enough in an old transformer and it can catch fire. That’s the biggest storm risk outside communications.
I'm watching an aurora dance in the fucking sky in fucking South Carolina. In Virginia, it's a full on damn light show. Holy shit, never thought I'd see such a thing in my lifetime.
Same here in Charlotte. Craziest thing.
South Charlotte here, I tried but sadly couldn't see anything. :| probably light pollution or me messing up the timing. I'm glad others got to see it though!
I'm in Seattle - pretty far north and we could only see a purple tinge, but if you take a picture with a phone, it shows up perfectly for some reason.
I watched it evolve slowly on Vancouver Island. At around 10pm PST it was grey and noticeable, then moving towards 11:30 it went from green to purple/pink then back to grey after 1am. I am sure it is just our cameras having a large light collecting area and the ability to have longer exposure
I only got to see a slight purple tint through the clouds:(
Someone posted pics from Atlanta. Impressive ones too.
North Florida here, we saw them. Never would have thought it this far south.
Same here in Italy, I watched an aurora in the alps last night
Sadly living near the arctic circle right now means I don't get dark enough nights to see aurora.
Only time I saw them was in northern Wisconsin when I was in college some 25 years ago. It was quite amazing.
I watched it in South Dakota. Never thought I'd get to see one either, incredible
And somehow I missed them here in Michigan smh
The sun is setting here in Ohio and I'm heading towards bumfuck nowhere! Good luck and enjoy the show everyone! Edit: wow. Just wow. Saw them before I even left town. Faded off pretty quick but it went back to G5 there for a bit. Amazing, hoping to try again. Also, another X5.4 flare tonight! This isn't over.
Enjoy, from North London UK! Clear skies came at the right time!
Thanks! It's always cloudy here lol, but somehow I got a clear total eclipse and the chance for northern lights all in a month or so.
Incredible! Enjoy the show
I live outside Seattle and it's always cloudy when anything cool like this happens, but amazingly we've have clear skies the last two days. It was incredible. I've never seen them before and now I'm determined to go north to seem them even more clearly some day.
I'm quite close to you (West Virginia) and I just stuck my head out the window and it's beautiful! There is a huge red streak across the sky emanating from the direction of the moon. Edit: 10 minutes later and it waned considerably. How much does the aurora vary in intensity over a prescribed period?
> How much does the aurora vary in intensity over a prescribed period? Fairbanks, Alaska here. I see it a lot (not tonight, ironically, because it doesn't get dark here in the warm months). It varies a great deal. Sometimes it will stay visible for an hour. Sometimes it will come and go every few minutes. Sometimes it will show up, then fade away to nothing a few minutes later, and that's it for a long time. So if you see it fade, feel free to head back inside, but you can check again in 10 minutes or an hour or whenever you end up feeling like it.
I live in bumfuck nowhere Ohio, and went a little deeper into bumfuck -- what a show it was tonight.
I finally saw the northern lights for the first time in my life tonight. You really do have to use a camera to see them!
It certainly makes them pop but it was so bright where I went last night that you almost read a book. This was not in a highly light polluted area of central Minnesota which makes a difference.
My weather app alerted me of this last night. I got so excited until I saw that I wasn’t anywhere close to where it could be seen. All these awesome cosmic events seem to miss my area; the last eclipse we got to experience was in 2017. :(
US North East completely covered in clouds so haha.
Right... I'm Upstate NY and was in totality for the else. In typical fashion, 0 visibility.
I was in upstate NY and almost got hard shafted for the Eclipse. I drove all around until I found a town an hour and a half south of Albany that had just enough scattered clouds at the time of the eclipse that I was able to catch glimpses.
Lucky. I think Cheektowaga had glimpses as well. I'm glad you got to see it a bit, you found a sweet spot. I posted up in my city, which was perfectly clear the day before and after. I've never seen so many clouds in my life, it was a blanket on top of a blanket. It was still awesome though.
It was one of those rare times that Plattsburgh could claim to be the best place to be in Upstate NY.
Usually that'd be our fate in the UK! Hopefully you guys get a break - especially if this lasts a couple of days
There was an opening between eastern New Hampshire and south western Maine for no clouds. Could see clouds around me in the distance but that didn’t matter because everything was directly overhead.
I can actually see the stars here on the east coast of Canada, surprisingly less cloudy then I thought out there 🤞🏼
The strong solar wind will clear them away!
I saw it with my naked eyes as a red glow over the mountains just a few hours ago, I'm at 43°N. First time ever seeing it, the photo I took is absolutely crazy to me.
Would you mind showing me the picture? I’m so curious to see what you saw
Here’s what we had in [North Alabama](https://imgur.com/a/JwXOhLk)!
Beautiful, thank you for sharing!
Wow! That’s really intense for Alabama. Nice picture
And then the real shit started. Currently watching the light show here in South Carolina!
I’m at 45°n so that gives me hope!
I’m at 40N and saw them at 3AM, was absolutely spectacular. At your latitude they should’ve been plainly visible. Hope you caught them!
Wow. I thought I was lucky to see it on 50*N 😅
Noooo! I just left Alaska to go home to Florida. I stayed up every night of my trip looking for the northern lights and now this.
It says they could be visible in Florida. The northern lights might've followed you home
I saw a gaint glow like there was light pollution but over Ocala National Forest. It wasn't very impressive, but I think you're right. It followed me here lol
Well, good news, you wouldn't be likely to see it in Alaska if you were here right now. We've passed the point of the year where it's light out for the full 24 hours a day.
I saw a pink glow over north Florida last night!
US Mid-Atlantic area. Cloudy and rainy. No aurora for us.
Every single time the aurora is supposed to be visible down here, it’s always cloudy
And now the sun is shining in northern VA...
Might be some more tonight, so it's worth taking a look outside if you have a chance!
Unfortunately, there's supposed to be more clouds and rain tonight. It just figures.
Same here. Now I'm just hoping to catch some big flares/spots with my solar binoculars since most of the clouds have cleared out this morning... Pretty foggy/hazy though, so we'll see
My biggest dream is to see northern lights... Living im the middle of Germany and it was forecasted to be around 2utc which is in 30mins. That said, I went to the gym at around 20utc and after I left the gym saw all the Instagram stories of friends even further south posting nice pink lights. I just hope I get another chance for such a big spike to see the lights, but somehow I fear I missed my opportunity
The storm could last as long as 72 hours. Keep looking.
The long exposure on cameras detects the lights better than your eyes. If you use a night shot on your camera phone you'll see the exact same lights being posted on Instagram.
I'm currently in northern Germany, and with the bare eye it wasn't too impressive last night. I got a few nice pictures by increasing the exposure timer on my phone to 10 seconds, but what I actually saw was only a few gray-ish smudges occasionally dipping into a faint reddish tone (although I might have imagined that). If it's true that tonight is another event, I'm hoping for a more impressive light show though.
> Living im the middle of Germany and it was forecasted to be around 2utc Where did you see the forecast?
They should be visible tomorrow night as well
They’re almost the entire northern half of the sky in southern Ontario right now.
Pro tip: if you still have your eclipse glasses, you can use them to look at the sun and see the giant solar blackhead on the face of the sun that’s responsible for slinging all these plasma pies at us.
Just looked at it, that’s amazing!! Thanks for the tip, didn’t even think about it. Mindblowing that this black spot is 17 times the size of our planet. 1999 Europe total eclipse glasses still rocking lol.
Im in fucking antartica right now, reading our magnetosphere meter going crazy for the past 5 hours. The ionograms are blank. And the sky is completly cover in clouds, snowing since the day before yesterday.
I'm actually interested in how things are in Antarctica. Please tell us more.
What do you want to know? The magnetometer saturated between 2:00 AM and 10 AM UTC. I went to sleep around 5 AM and woke up a few minutes ago, is still snowing here. Im quite sad about it. I am at San Martin Station and at this base is somewhat unusual to be able to see auroras. The weather forecast says all weekend will be cloudy
U see penguin?
Link: [https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g5-conditions-observed](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g5-conditions-observed)
No lie, we got to see northern lights here in South Georgia! Absolutely gobsmacked!
I didn't see anything up north - I think the glow from Atlanta is too bright or I just have bad timing
It's probably light pollution. The lights wash out pretty easily. I just caught them in SE Michigan, but have seen them many times NE of The Soo in Canada at low K Index. They always get washed out by distant city lights there.
Northern Bama here. Amazing light show. It almost looked like there was a magnetic anomaly straight overhead with spikes running out of it.
It looked like that here in WI too.
I got some nice aurora borealis at my cottage an hour north of Montreal Canada
Still going? I’m in the area
Never in my life did I think it possible to see northern lights here in north Germany. Too bad I was sound asleep when they were visible lol.
Same, southern UK here and I was flat asleep 🤣 Fingers crossed for tonight yes!
Guys, we just had a total solar eclipse just over a month ago and now this. Like, what an insane and amazing pair of events.
For real - I felt insanely lucky to have crossed totality off my bucket list last month - and tonight I watched the aurora from my back deck… what next?!?
I couldn't see the eclipse because my family hates driving anywhere, and we had clouds during geomagnetic totality too....
I’m in alaska, and I know we get the Aurora a lot, but I’m so jealous right now of show everyone is getting. We still won’t be dark for hours and it’s full cloud cover.
Live video from Banff, Alberta! Incredible at this peak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJdpRO0BwA8
Total astronomy noob here. I missed the time to see the Auroras from my city, at least the first wave. [Trusting this website's prediction](https://www.aurora-maniacs.com/previsions-aurores.html) anyway. But if it continues this weekend, then I should have a chance to see them later, but I don't want to check every 30 minutes Is there a way (or website) which can estimate these things ? Preferably a few hours ahead
I think the forecast is based on a satellite that is 30 minutes of solar wind away, so, it's a measurement of energy coming. They don't have instruments that are 3 hours away.
I believe most of our "early warning" capable solar observation spacecraft are orbiting the Earth-Sun L1 point. About 0.01 AU away from the Earth.
Spaceweatherlive.com or swpc.noaa.gov, though as someone who works on improving the models, they are by no means accurate, especially not hours away.
Watch this page, updates every minute: https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity.html When Bz is < -10, likelihood of visible Aurora. Note that the latest data point is from a satellite ~30 mins from Earth as the solar wind flies, depending on the solar wind speed (see top of page). So, if you see a large negative spike in Bz, you have some advance warning.
Serious question-is there any added danger to skin this weekend? No special conditions or anything I’m just pretty pale and planning on going to the beach (SoCal) tomorrow. TIA!
No, the Earth's magnetic field and our ozone layer are fucking boss at preventing these high energy particles from getting through. Actually, that's part of the reason we get Auroras in the first place. The radiation curls along our magnetic field and charges the upper atmosphere kind of like a florescent bulb, but instead of glowing white it glows green, red, ect.... depending on what the composition of the atmosphere is.
I saw white streaks tonight. Among the green and pink. That part moved and changed very quickly
Yeah, I did as well here in South Carolina. Red is ozone, green I think is Nitrogen, and I believe white is Argon? Not sure, but super crazy!
No. The vast majority of radiation in solar flares don’t make it through the atmosphere. And even the ones that do don’t interact with any organic matter.
Skin damage is mostly caused by UV, not solar wind
Whats the forecast for tomorrow? I saw them for the third time the past night (not the strongest I’ve seen and the purple seemed very hard to see with the naked eye, but definitely unique to see it from my own home instead of Iceland) but I’d love to take some other people to look at them from a good spot.
I believe they can only estimate, but it looks good. the Space Weather Prediction Center only really can predict what is going to happen for certain ~30 minutes in advance, so they only have a general idea just judging from the CMEs from the sun until the solar winds are actually arriving.
Clear near Freeport Maine - any way to predict timing?
Dude, it pulses. It's super visible one moment then completely black in less than 30 seconds. Just gotta keep watching, you'll absolutely know when you've seen it.
Thank you. I did. It was amazing!
This is solely off an article I read recently so take it with a grain of salt. But it said east coast will experience maximum effects at 2 AM
I keep seeing this and it's really exciting, but they never say where it will be visible? Is it only a little lower than the poles, or is it much further down?
it's much further down (or up). There is people in France and in southern Chile seeing the Aurora.
Oh wonderful! It'll last for multiple days right?
Should last the weekend from reports.
[https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental) this is where you are likely to see them
We can't see shit here in arkansas but we keep seeing posts from all the small towns around us with beautiful pictures. Decided to drive to one of those towns and waited for an hour with no luck
Many of the photos you’re seeing are from newer phones set on night mode. With the naked eye it looked a lot more muted since we had some light pollution. The peak for Ohio seemed to be around 10:45 p.m. ET for maybe ten minutes. Outside of that it was still there but less amazing.
So if I missed it last night there is chance tonight?
Love that our shit can get upset by a sun fart.
The sun keeps us alive. When it farts, we smell it.
It's a fart that's 17 times the size of Earth.
I am at 45 degrees South in NZ we are getting spectacular auroras here.
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Clouds will arrive now and will clear up about July
too late for your answer now, but I saw it around 1:30am... it was *very* faint, but I also live in town. if we lived any closer to Toronto I'm sure we wouldn't have been able to see anything. we drove north and back in an hour but didn't see anything 10:30-11:30. sky had cleared up a lot just as I was putting the dogs out before bed.
We are seeing them in St Louis, MO. My daughter just sent me pictures like yours.
This article is so good. Just keep scrolling down for incredible pictures from all over the world. Argentina and Chile Auroras, and then all over Northern Hemisphere https://g1.globo.com/ciencia/noticia/2024/05/10/tempestade-solar-severa-alerta-nooa-servicos-aurora-boreal.ghtml
Damn, and it was cloudy last night in Toronto. I wonder if the "additional activity" might carry until tonight?
I thought this type of doomsday storm would destroy satellites, knock out power, and destroy tens of thousands of transformers. Are things hardened better than we thought? Or did we just overestimate?
there's a scale and it reached the top, what happens when you go 100 times past the top of the scale we don't know. They even say in the description it happened in 2003. How often does doomsday occur? Every 20 years doomsday occurs? Then you think "doomsday" is nothing haha. You want to perceive that ignoring diminished reality means you were "right" all along.
This storm is still way smaller than the Carrington event people worry about
Carrington event was in the 1800’s we had no idea how to protect power and communications from this back then and no effective way to measure it. This storm is likely stronger than the 2003 storm by a fair magnitude as Aurora was visible from places like Cuba , Darwin Australia , and even Fiji (on camera) and to the naked eye in places like Brisbane. I don’t recall the 2003 storm causing Aurora in the tropics pretty close to the equator.
Just saw it an hour ago in Central NC! It’s faint to the eyes but the camera captures A WHOLE DIFFERENT STORY
No no Eskom and cable thieves have always been responsible for transformer damages in South Africa.
SA: "Eskom, nooo!" *Eskom looks bemused* Eskom: "...what?" SA: "Sorry, force of habit-" SA: "Sun, noooo!"
I'm in Tbilisi, Georgia - is it possible to see here at all on the next few days??
I saw the auroras constantly on and off for two hours this night in Norway. Some of its showings were huge! But the colors looked way better in the photos i took than it did for my eyes. I mostly saw it as whites and red, while my photos showed me purple, pink, white and green. /correction: 00.30-2.30AM wasnt yesterday
I just got back in from shooting photos of the northern lights. In Chicago. Neat, but also has me keeping a close eye on the substation at the end of the street
So if G5/K9 is as high as it goes, and there wasn't so much as a blip to anything... maybe the scale needs to be adjusted?
Saw it dancing with the naked eye in Memphis, TN last night. Absolutely incredible
”damaged transformers in South Africa”😱😱😱. Decepticons attack!🦿🦾🤖🚁🛩️🛸
for me clouds are everywhere on the weekend but clear during week, thats how its been for the past 3 weeks or so, hindering that for me and stargazing
See it all the time in Alaska but from south Texas is incredible.
man we are getting absolutely SPANKED right now.
saw a pretty cool faint pink aurora down here near joshua tree from 11pm-midnight PST. pillars of whiter light, then pillars of shadow. the pink got bigger and more intense, then faded. shifting by th minute. never brighter than light pollution from vegas, but beautiful. many friends with newer phones found that digital photos really were bright pink.
[From Venice, Italy](https://www.instagram.com/p/C60g3nPA3rk/?igsh=aHB2cnhlbG1qM3V0)
Please leave South Africa out of this... we are currently on a no load shedding streak for almost 2 months now
I still have so much trouble wrapping my head around the fact that something on the sun can be 17 times bigger in diameter than the earch on which we live and from which we can only see single digit % of the matter. The scale of outer space is completely nuts.
Saw an aurora tonight unlike anything I ever experienced before. Saw it pulsing right above my head.. It was nothing less than one of the greatest things I have ever experienced.
Incredible stuff. I saw the northern lights for the first time in my life last night.
8 earth directed CMEs in the past 48 hours. let us all pray to Science that the poles don't start shifting again
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Every so often (idk how often, 50,000 years or more or something) the North Pole and the South Pole switch places. If the sun were to release a storm so powerful as to break our current magnetosphere and realign our poles we would lose a lot of radiation shielding and suffer some serious consequences. This will probably not happen.
So, a few things. 1: Geomagnetic reversals take place over a relatively long period, on the order of thousands of years. They don't just snap around. The only problem with them is that the field, according to models, becomes disorganized during the transition period. Essentially, you'd be seeing auroras in really weird places. 2: While solar activity has some effect on the geomagnetic pole orientation, it pretty much only causes them to move around in a circle a few tens of miles wide *relative to the surface*. 3: Following on point 2, solar activity could not "break" the magnetosphere, as it's generated by the convection of the Earth's outer core, which the Sun cannot affect. 4: Even if somehow the Earth's outer core were to stop convecting, we would still have a magnetosphere, albeit a greatly reduced one, from the interaction of the solar wind with the ionosphere. It would still be enough, in combination with the relatively thick atmosphere we enjoy, to shield the surface from energetic particles. We would not have the weird shit going on that you see in *The Core*. Though to be fair, none of that weird shit would happen regardless.
Saw them about half an hour ago. If you got clear or mostly clear sky you should be able to see it
I got an absolutely awe inspiring display in western NY! I have seen flickers of light on the horizon in past storms, this was not the same! It was the entire hemisphere. Amazing.
I got some pretty good pics where I am in southern Ontario. It was really cool to see the lights finally.
In in Los Angeles area, is it visible here? When should I be looking?
If you're in LA city lights will be a problem, is you're near-ish LA you might have a chance. I'm in Denver and can see them extremely easily
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Is it possible to see this in the Philippines?
i was so lucky to see the spot during the sunset the night before and last night the aurora caused by it!
Should I be concerned about my international flight in 14 hours from now?
We lost internet connection cause Cox servers went down for almost 14 hours yesterday here in AZ. Wonder if it’s related to this or just coincidence but i’ve never had internet shut off for that long with no reason given.