Seeing the Northern Lights

Due to the intense, heightened activity we've seen from the sun recently, it might be possible for some that live lower in latitude to catch a rare glimpse of the Northern Lights.

From SpaceWeather:

Earth's magnetic field has been strongly disturbed since approximately 1300 UT on Sept. 26th when a CME hit our planet. The impact strongly compressed the magnetosphere, exposing geosynchronous satellites to solar wind plasma, and ignited auroras around both poles.

....auroras have been sighted in New York, South Dakota, and Maine. More states will surely join the list as the night unfolds.

Below are the areas projected to have a possible view of the auroras

Source: NOAA SWPC

To see if you can view the lights, take a look towards the north. Typically the best time to view is around midnight, although it is possible to see lights throughout the night. Chances are good that there will be more than one opportunity to see the Aurora Borealis over the next weeks and months as we're entering an active solar cycle.

Geomagnetic K-Indices tend to be a good measures of whether or not one will be able to see any auroras. The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center publishes these and updates them regularly here. If you see anything over six on the scale, relative to your location (for instance, I live in Pennsylvania, so it would make sense for me to pay attention to the Fredericksburg, Va. K-Index), take a look outside and see if you can see anything.

Interesting view of the Aurora Borealis from the ISS:


Stay tuned, NASA predicts that we'll see "the strongest Northern Lights activity in 50 years" over the next year or so.

Source: Daily Mail

Here's an animation of the model SWPC used to accurately forecast the Coronal Mass Ejection's (CME) arrival. The model, known as WSA-Enlil shows a view from above the north poles of the Sun and Earth, with the Sun shown as a yellow circle and the Earth as a green circle. The animation shows where density is high (as in the CME) in the colors of red, white and black, and where density is low (as in the background solar wind) in colors of blue and green. The CME is the curved, high density structure that transits from the Sun to the Earth. From the animation, it is clear we missed the center of the CME.

Youtube

Sep 26th 2011

I can say that up here north of the 60th parallel, it was cloudy but we could see the lights through the clouds... that's how bright they were tonight!!!

Saw them here in Detroit, Michigan area last night.

Amazing!

thanks for bringing this to my attention.

i hope i´ll be in the position to see this phenomonon, first hand, in the near future

not too long ago i did a thread about the Northern Lights in Finland, it was a beautiful timelapse video.

didn´t recieve that much attention but i´ll post it here anyway.



also the vid from the ISS is amazing!

looks freakishly beeautiful, haven´t got any other words to describe the scenery seen.

i missed them do to rain the sky was brighter to the north than normal. I found it strange that everyone on the new madrid fault saw the northern lights. Something made me think northern light are a precurser to a quake but couldn't find any info to back up the claim. doubt there will be one because it would of happend already. I heard people in VA could see it which i find unbelievable. I wonder how far south it was seen. The fact that the last 5 days there where no reports of a earth bound solar flare and then intence northern lights don't make much sense. Is there more going on or did nasa fall asleep at the computer.