I feel I need to report my experience from Denmark, Jutland.
It started with white broad streaks, which most of all looked like fog, but then perhaps after 10 minutes or so, we saw colors of red, purple and green begin to emerge from the these streaks. Most astoundingly it all seemed to emanate from a fluctuating point in the middle of the sky. If you looked closely at this point you could see it fall into itself, morphing and shifting continuously.
We went around the house and we could purple streaks at the top and orange to red patches at the bottom of the sky.
Colors observed:
Whitish blue,
Green,
Purple,
Red,
and Orange
I was out flying a camera drone on the river Dee between Liverpool and North Wales filming the sunset, when I started getting magnetic interference warnings. At the same time, I started to see flashes in the sky. Then my vision was filled with sparkling lights. A few minutes later I got an aurora warning from my brother and the aurora app. KP 8-9
As the sun went down I was waking through a woodland. I thought the dark would help my eyes to see the aurora, and I could point my camera away from the light pollution of Liverpool and maybe catch some colour with a long exposure.
Suddenly, I realised the colour of the aurora was coming through the trees, and getting brighter. I wasn't expecting it to be visible to naked eye like this. In these latitudes the advice is to set your camera to highest iso and slowest shutter speed and hope to catch a little colour. I wasn't expecting this! So I packed up quick and ran through the woods and into open fields. There, directly above me was this intense white light, with white arms forming a sort-of cross. The longest arm formed an arch over the whole sky, and where they reached the earth, on either side they became colourful, like a twinkling rainbow stretching out to space.
I didn't have the equipment or the wits to get a good photo. I just threw myself on the ground and lay on my back watching.
Wildest thing I ever saw. Absolutely awesome.
When I regain my composure, I will upload some photos somewhere (where, though?) and edit this comment.
You did the right thing, the correct way is to just enjoy it with your eyes. There are enough photos and timelapses on the net anyway. They can't capture the speed of the real thing since you need pretty long exposure time to get enough light.
Not who you were replying to, but I've had the AuroraWatch UK app installed for a while now (and yes, we enjoyed last night's display, after being alerted by the app).
I’m a few thousand kilometres south of you in Portugal - here, we got the side view of what was above you, and it was spectacular - pink sky underlit by blue and green filled with vast columns. It really gave me the sense of being a tiny thing on a virtually naked sphere hurtling through the void - seeing such titanic structures really puts things into scale.
Thank you for sharing that. I wonder at what speed the morphing happen, also a sense of proportion. Very hard to capture that in anything but direct experience.
Per Wikipedia, most auroras are 300 to 600 km wide, and occur at 90 to 150 km above surface. It' below LEO (300 km), but it's considered outer space already. You actually see a thing the size of a mountain range shining and morphing above you in space.
Thee scale is what the pictures don't capture. The color is stronger in the camera but at some point there was a red or pink streak across half the sky. From zenith and down 1/2 way on one side and 2/3 on the other side. As usual, it's hard for a camera to capture the feeling of being there and having it all above you.
The scale of change I saw yesterday is that it fades in or changes over five seconds maybe, it's not changing faster than that. The most intense lights were over some 20 minute period maybe and then slowly it was mostly disappearing again.
Not sure here in proper continental Europe, but the usual sightings in the Arctic Circle are typically very short. Like it shows up for a minute or even not so. Then you wait an hour and another sighting for tens of seconds.
Obviously sometimes it lasts for hours, but this is nothing frequent (in given location).
I am looking at the foto webcam images too and haven't seen the aurora myself, but the photos show a much longer timespan:
For Wildhaus the first image with a pink/greenish glow is at 22:22
Currently pretty good at the South Pole. The pink skies are wild. Green auroras are fairlty common over the winter, but it's unusual for it to be this red.
If you're interested in a real time video, here's one I captured a few weeks ago from our "back yard" (excuse the Instagram link)
Sadly we have pretty high winds at the moment and visibility is poor due to all the blowing snow, but if you're high up (eg an observation deck), it's a bit clearer.
When I took photos of the northern lights on my Sony RX1 the colours became much stronger. I assumed all digital cameras captured the colours better than our eyes.
Yes, an electronic sensor is much more sensitive than our eyes. However, even within digital sensors, some are more sensitive than others. Add that sensitivity with the ability to do long exposure, and you can capture things we will never see with our naked eyes. Even with binoculars or telescopes, our eyes will just seem more photons, but pretty much without the color. That's where the digital sensors really "shine"
Our eyes definitely do not see "pretty much without the color". Born and raised in Norway I've watched more aurora borealis than I care to count. On many occassions you could see all kinds of colors and dancing lights with the naked eye, very strong and vivid, too. Important to be in a dark environment without light pollution. At the arctic circle during polar night you will see northern lights that almost match the most stunning photos you have seen.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. My brother, who is a hobby astronomer, called me and sent me outside. Initially, I saw only a faint red glow in the northeast of the sky, but after a few minutes, my eyes adapted and I could see how it slowly moved and changed its form over time. I stayed outside for maybe 15 minutes and then went back inside. An hour later, I went outside again and almost the whole sky was shining in all different colors and forms, from patches to clouds to pillars that seemed to support the heavens, ever chaning. Incredible.
In southern Netherlands at the coast, with a 10 sec exposure, iPhone 12 mini, main cam, I was able to see some pink and green with streaks. To my eyes it was like faint clouds that changed to quickly to be clouds, better visible when I didn’t look straight at them. Your pics are something else, but what was it like to your eyes?
In the east of the Netherlands I was seeing something similar to what you describe, but when particularly active I also saw a reddish glow in places. This is a timelapse I made around the same time:
https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl
From Bournemouth in the UK, I got the same impression as you - looking like cloud sheets, but more straight lines than, say, what windblown contrails look like. No clear color visible to me but the location wasn't anywhere near "dark".
I've seen impressive (and colorful) aurora before, and can well imagine it might've looked splendid in (darker) places. Don't give up ... maybe more on the way.
The colors in my pics are a bit more intense than they were to the eyes, but not by that much. They were all clearly visible, including all the structures, glowing. It is pretty dark where I come from, the next city is dozens of kilometers away.
Thanks, I'm in Bavaria, so there
might have been be a chance and the other comments say there are more solar storms upcoming. Definitely will have my eyes in the sky tonight. The images are amazing, btw.
It should definitely have been possible to see it from Bavaria. It was definitely visible in northern Italy. Big cities might have to much light pollution though. Let's hope we get lucky tonight.
Doesn’t look like that in reality. If I take a photo on my phone here in the UK midlands I get pink and green in all directions with a 3 second exposure.
However with just the naked eye it’s like super high level clouds
Ok why is it that some people say northern lights look EXACTLY like these spectacular photos, and others say in real life they are actually barely visible and you need a camera and very dark skies?
Is there some kind of running joke I’m missing? I saw some northern lights in Iceland but they were very dim and underwhelming, I didn’t even know what I was looking at until I photographed them and saw the vivid green streaks in the photo, which definitely weren’t super visible in real life. The tour guide even said they aren’t actually like the photos at all!
Are northern lights bullshit or what? What is possible to see with just a bare naked eye?
They'll never look exactly like the long exposure, ultra vibrant photos. However, when they are really strong you can see both greens and purples very distinctly with the naked eye.
One experience you can get in person when they're really strong is how fast they can dance around above you as well. I've found the dancing lights to the naked eye are much more astounding than in timelapses or videos, 1) because that's when they're most vibrant in person, and 2) because you can see just how fast and jittery and energetic they are, unlike in a video which is usually captured at much less than 30fps for low light and denoised and frames mashed together to create those soupy smooth videos and timelapses. Nice in their own way, but nowhere near the same experience.
And when they're very low energy they will just look like green grey clouds to the naked eye.
I've seen both impressive (colorful, bright, straight overhead and fast movement) as well as barely noticeable (colorless bands/sheets that "look like faint clouds but somehow odd". With the "odd" mostly meaning that they move different from clouds; not preferentially in wind (or any) direction, and often just around our eye's threshold. It also, sometimes, looks like a band of light pollution low along the northern horizon, when the green main aurora oval is "just" visible.
Few-seconds exposures on a digital camera bring the colors out that you may or may not see by eye if the aurora is weak.
Also, especially mid-latitudes, sometimes an Aurora display has moments of higher brightness with color, and then again "grey curtains".
The most impressive thing about stronger Aurora, to me, is the "fine structure", the fact you may have it well overhead (not just on the northern horizon) and the fast movements. It can look like "beads" running up and down the curtains, or "lances" being thrown from the sky, and line/streak structures are very sharply outlined, not like the soft blur in multi-second pictures. And the curtains can "wave" across the entire sky in a second then.
But I haven't seen enough Aurora to dare predict anything ... I cross my fingers.
Imo if the northern lights are strong, the live experience is superior to photos because of how they move, while photos are still images. But many times they are not as strong and they do not look like much with naked eye, while long exposure will catch more of it.
One thing to consider is that when you run outside because you get a tip about northern lights, your eyes need about 20-30 minutes to fully adjust to darkness. If you do things like look at a phone display or camera display while waiting, that "timer" gets reset.
In my experience when the lights are strong (and your eyes have adjusted), they look a lot like the photos - not as saturated color-wise, but very bright.
I wonder the same. My wife and I drove out to a park east of Seattle late last night to spend a couple hours watching the aurora, and it was... okay. I saw some faint grey wisps, like high-altitude clouds, which occasionally faded away and reappeared elsewhere. A mild novelty, but nothing I would bother to seek out again; I assumed we were too far south, or out of the path, and hadn't gotten to see it properly.
This morning, though, my feeds are chock-a-block with dramatic, colorful, detailed photos, complete with rapturous commentary about the drama of the spectacle, posted by people in the same area who were apparently watching the same sky! Well... that's a different experience than I had. I'd been told that the colors showed up more clearly through a camera, but I hadn't realized there would be little to see without one.
There are many variables. Visual acuity, how well your eyes can adapt to low light, colour sensitivity, light pollution and cloud cover are just a few. Even standing next to each other two people can have different experiences thanks to those variables.
I am very fortunate to have excellent visual acuity, low light sensitivity and am extremely sensitive to colour/different shades or tones. There are test you can do online for this if you have a well calibrated screen. I also used to be a photographer and worked for years in low light settings documenting events. So I have put that good fortune in the genetic lottery to good use!
So for me, I absolutely saw the full colour display very strongly. I could see variations in colour throughout the height of the column and i could easily make out the striations between the different filaments. I could also easily see the curve of the bands across the northern sky. The colours to me were as obvious as the orange of light pollution you might see from a nearby town. I could see the low level patches of cloud silhouetted against the green and the huge bands of red/pinky red towering up into space.
What I will say though is that even looking at my phone was enough to dull the experience. And minimally strong light in the eye instantly desaturated the colours of the aurora and took a minute or two to recover. So you really do need dark places, dark skies and to really let your eyes full adjust to their maximum possible sensitivity.
So at 9:55PM in central Kansas, you could see definite pink/red in the north (vertical strips, reminiscent of sunset/sunrise through clouds) and a bright colorless/maybe greenish patch straight up. Also some faint pink to the west. The color was unmistakable in the north though and only required a minute or so of dark adaptation after coming out of the house. It's dark skies here but not extremely dark. Funny thing is the aurora itself made the sky very not-dark.
That's a little like asking people to report how wet they got when it was raining, and not controlling for if they have an umbrella or were out after the storm passed.
> Ok why is it that some people say northern lights look EXACTLY like these spectacular photos, and others say in real life they are actually barely visible and you need a camera and very dark skies?
There is a lot of variability in people’s night vision. I viewed this past aurora with a friend, we went to a relatively dark sky location and let our eyes adjust for 30 minutes. In that setting, I could make out the green and red coloration while she mostly saw it as a while glow.
I saw them yesterday mostly as light grey clouds. But at one moment, those clouds turned slightly red to me. I am at a very bright location and quite far to the south. So I only can assume, that their brightness was at the brink of color vision and that my eye wasn't perfectly adapted to the dark. In better circumstances and perhaps with a tiny bit more "signal", they should appear in colors.
Not bullshit. When you see a strong one, it looks like all the amazing photos, and better because it’s moving and spanning the sky. Photos never capture the scale.
I had a similar thought about the sun’s corona during a solar eclipse, for some reason I thought people were using special photo processes to extract something that was hard to see without equipment. Then caught an eclipse and the corona blooms like a huge flower in the sky and it’s better than almost all the photos. I’m guessing the dynamic range of the corona makes it very hard to photograph anywhere near as good as what it looks like when you’re there.
Last night from London the most I could see with my naked eye was diffuse patches of faint pink and green - sometimes highlighted by marginally brighter white-pink streaks that cut across the patches. The camera however picked them up as dramatic bright pink/green columns of light with rarely any trace of the blackness of the sky.
When I was in Iceland a few years ago though - I distinctly remember being easily able to make out super bright and well define dancing wavy bands of bright green, pink, purple and orange (with high contrast compared to the surrounding dark sky) with my naked eye. The camera again picked up the same thing but with the blackness of the sky covered by a green /pink coloured background - something definitely brighter but less well defined that what I could see with my naked eye (and the camera images were not necessarily superior than what I could see in this case).
TL:DR; I’ve seen both versions of what you describe with my naked eye and it’s definitely not bullshit! When people say they can’t see anything like the pictures - I would have to guess that they either have never been in an area with significant activity or maybe didn’t have dark enough skies without light pollution.
In my back garden in london initially it felt like maybe I was just seeing remnants of having looked at a lightbulb and then looking at the sky. After a bit of eyes adjusting the pinks were very clear and the white streaks like rays of light you see in those kind of beams from heaven type pictures. The green was more on the horizon and initially needed the camera to show it at all, and then again after a while I could see feint green with the naked eye. Yes the camera showed it more, but the naked eye experience was also magical and I feel very lucky to have seen it on bbc news website by chance before going to bed. I watched it from 11:15pm to midnight when it seemed to vanish as if it was never there in the first place. I feel like I caught the ISS in a photo too but I can’t find definitive information it was overhead at 11:51pm uk time, so it probably wasn’t.
Yeah, typically northern lights look like faint white clouds with a little bit of green tint to naked eye. The photos are like those time-exposure photos of the milky way, which is not what the eye sees.
If you ever have the chance to see the Milky way from Namibia, the Andes, the Western Australian desert, you may revise your view there. The dust clouds and star streams extend far out and make it appear like "standing on the bridge of as starship". It looks very 3D. Still not colorful, but immersive and so much detail.
Alas, in the northern hemisphere, we've been pretty good eradicating nighttime darkness (and a lot else besides ...).
In the northern hemisphere, you can enjoy that view - spectacularly - from Mauna Kea. I had never before realized that you could perceive depth in the sky.
You should try seeing the milky way from the middle of an ocean sometime - most folks have never been far enough from light pollution to really see it as it used to be.
It really does look like a river of starlight across the sky, once you are a few hundred miles away from shore.
In addition to the intensity of the Solar activity, location matters, especially nowadays.
The auroras won't be super vivid near larger cities in Central Europe, with a lot of light around you. It's just not north enough and not dark enough. Up north, rural Lapland or so, it can get very vivid during a winter.
Cameras tend to add their extra though.
A surprising thing to me was how the aurora can sometimes be still and sometimes move so fast. It is a strange experience. One would expect something that covers such a large part of the visible sky-dome to move slowly, but instead it can swipe around quite quickly ("like a fox's tail").
While they "typically" look like that, because most often they're quite weak, I wouldn't compare it to milky way photos. If it's strong, especially if you're up north and somewhere with little light pollution, what you see is comparable to lots of pictures.
Yeah, camera sensors (depending on filtering) are far more sensitive to the dim light of the aurora than our eyes. Still means you can get utterly amazing photography there already! :)
What the camera caught was really impressive! Even with just a couple seconds exposure on a phone. But what the human eye saw was.... effectively a portion of the sky that was unusually bright and seemed to have some sort of movement. Like you stared at it and knew something was amiss, but nothing "impressive" to look at.
A couple of years ago in the middle of Norway (not south, not north, in-between) me and a friend saw in the news that there would be aurora borealis, which is not common in that part of Norway.
We were outside at like 2AM in the night that day trying to spot it but could see any hint of it for the life of us.
Finally we used his phone and long exposure to see what it would pick up and on the captured photo we saw shades of green like aurora borealis.
For sure. As mentioned though we were in the middle of Norway, not north.
Well, actually the proper term for where we were at is East Norway. And I guess by official standards the middle of Norway is further north than where I consider the middle of Norway to be.
I was lucky enough to be in Tromsø in February 2013 during the last solar cycle maximum. It was absolutely amazing, even a local who we happened upon near one of the fjords while he was cross country skiing - in the middle of the night - said that he had never seen such aurora. They were gold and purple along with the more common greens and reds that we had seen all week.
I just came home, went up the mountains. Absolutely crazy what I was able to see. I live somewhere mid to north Germany. Super stoked to go further up north based on what I saw in the sky. I have to say the images don't even nearly do justice to what I saw tonight, it was absolutely amazing. I spent some 6 hours up there. Just poor phone images, sorry.
from sheer curiosity, I had to try to see what was in that image. just a meager push of the exposure revealed some color on top of the horrid compression:
If you want the best possible view with the naked eye, give them a chance to adapt to the dark properly. The human eye is about 100,000 more sensitive after an hour in total darkness. A smartphone screen or car headlight is enough to undo it.
Use the old pirate trick and keep an eye patch over one of the eyes, and switch when going outside. They used it to be able to see inside the boat going from bright sunlight.
There's no evidence that this use was real. Mythbusters tried it and said the trick itself does work (which any of has may already know), but who knows if it was even practical in a pirate boat, vs the loss of stereo vision etc.
The whole idea of pirates wearing eyepatches seems simply the replication of one particularly colorful pirate archetype over centuries of literature and tales.
I feel like the advantages of stereo vision may be oversold in this scenario. At the distances that sailing vessels would engage there's limited need for binocular depth cues - they really only start to come into play at the point where you would begin a boarding action
But the idea of the patches-for-night-vision is precisely to have one eye covered during the boarding, so when you enter the insides of the enemy boat that eye is ready for seeing in the dark.
I don't have binocular vision. I lived aboard a sailboat for a few years. I'm quite active with rock climbing etc and I honestly don't think I would be able to do anything better if I had binocular vision...
Such damage is creeping and the brain can just hallucinate the blank patches in the vision away, until only like 10% of the retina is left and it just doesn't work anymore. These days, dumbass laserheads are the most likely to suffer from that problem.
It's amazing how much of our conscious experience is hallucination, and yet a lot of people are disparaging LLMs for doing just the same...
probably because when humans pay full attention and think clearly they can not hallucinate for 99% of things they can sense (disregarfing optical illusion), but there is no 'pay attention and dont hallucinate' switch for LLMs.
People are bullshitting just the same about topics they know nothing about. They often also won't shut about when others tell them and even when they themselves know that they know nothing. To some extent this is necessary for humans to function at all, and the scientific process starts out from uneducated guesses and rigorously refines them and casts away what doesn't hold up to empiric data.
Optical illusions are evidence of the pile of hacks that our senses and our consciousness use to make sense of the world. I think it is really difficult to fully disengage from the biases this induces, and we are sadly best at perceiving such flaws in others. This might be one of the reasons why humans have to socialize with other humans to maintain mental health.
Makes sense.. all the serious astronomy apps are in black and red, and back before we had phones, we used to use red flashlights if we needed to consult our charts.
just like all of the 80s military action films with red filtered flashlights or CNC rooms on ships. sometimes, meme like content isn't just made up. as an amateur (at best) astro type person, you learn very quickly how true how quickly a brief flash of white light can ruin your night vision. walking around during the day without sun glasses can also extend the amount of time it takes your eyes to acclimate to the dark. however, once you do allow your eyes to acclimate to the dark, it is amazing to me still how much we can actually see.
On full moons, you can read a book and see the shadows cast by the moonlight. It's fun to take someone to see it for the first time who originally do not believe the shadows are possible.
Fun thing about Friday, there was no moon to see by. But absolutely, the full moon on a clear night can be a floodlight, especially with snow on a nighttime ski tour.
Yup. Here in the city of Seattle, I went to a park where there were lots of people and unfortunately, lots of light. I could see some wispy light in the sky, and it was interesting to look at but not very dynamic.
After I got home, I just laid down in the grass in the back yard where it's fairly dark. After about 15 minutes, I had a pretty good view of what looked a bit like streaky clouds throughout the sky. It was still somewhat faint but the movement was fantastic to watch.
car headlights are brighter than the sun from a short enough distance; perhaps you think we can guess what distance you're talking about seeing the car headline from, but actually you have to be explicit about it
In the dark notice how much light comes from a phone and how much that illuminates the person holding the phone.
A car headlight shining your way from hundreds of meters even over 1km will often illuminate that person far more than their phone screen.
So if the phone screen is enough to undo the hour long eyes adjusting to the dark duration, then the car headlights at almost any realistic distance causes an undo.
a headlight a kilometer away may be spread over 36000 square meters including your face. (more detailed info on headlight antenna gain would be appreciated.) a 1200-lumen high beam over that area is 0.03 lux
a 500 nit phone screen emitting over about a steradian from an 80mm × 160mm area is 6.4 lumens, but at night you usually turn it down to minimum brightness, say 0.6 lumens. (i haven't measured.) at a distance of 300mm that steradian is 0.09m², so it's about 6 lux
so the cellphone is about 200 times brighter than the headlight at that distance, and that's also observable from looking at people using cellphones walking on the highway
but the person i was asking for more detail didn't specify that the headlight is pointed at your face; and in most situations where you can see headlights, they're not pointed at you. that's just a detail you filled in
It's really damn beautiful, but it's scary.
Whenever there are events on Earth that aren't typical of nature at regular times for some reason I always think it's not a good sign..
I live in rural very northern England. It’s incredible, clear with the naked eye. iPhone 14 camera with 3s exposure is out of this world (pun intended, but misleading)
Since we're all scientists here, I'll report a negative from central York. My wife and I stood up in the attic looking out of the Velux for 10 minutes. It was dark, clear and we were could see from NE-ish to SE-ish. We couldn't really call it. A very subtle effect on a 10s smartphone exposure, mayyybe? I will compare with tonight.
We once rented a beautiful, slightly remote house on a beach outside Reykjavik and one night, the sky danced for us. So I don't feel hard done-by.
Interesting, maybe it depends on when you were looking? Also central York and we popped outside just after half eleven and the aurora was very visible to the naked eye, not in full multicolour but very clearly not a cloud, quite thick and radiating out from a centre in the sky almost all the way down to the horizon. We have a reasonably dark place we can look from near us (and where we got some photos on a smartphone camera that show a sky full of vivid purples and greens) but I could see it clearly enough from right outside our house even with the bright led streetlights all around.
After 20 minutes it faded from view almost entirely and we went inside. I have no idea if it came back or what it was like beforehand, maybe we got very lucky or maybe it came and went through the night?
I’m 5 miles to the east ! (Dunnington) and was gutted to hear this morning that I’d missed an amazing display here last night. Many people in the village saw the aurora in varied colours - greens, purples, pinks. Incredible photos… it sounds like it was just before midnight that it really kicked off.
Yeah, it's often easy to make it look much better on camera than what it did in real life. Something to keep in mind if one feel one missed out, heh.
Also, timelapses of long exposures can give a wrong impression of how it moves. But has for a long time been the only way to actually see a video of it.
It's often not that slow and wavy in real life. It's more like watching an orchestra play, where suddenly someone plays a flute in the corner, and then a few moments later a trombone sounds from the other side. It's dramatic and beautiful when it's really on.
But modern video cameras are now good enough to capture this in real time, so hopefully we'll see more realistic videoes.
In less rural northern England, it was faintly visible to me. If I hadn't been looking for the aurora specifically, I would have assumed it was a weird cloud. After walking a bit away from street lights I could make out a south facing arc spanning the sky directly overhead which went away within a few minutes.
Wow, I just went outside (South West of France) to plug the car for charging before going to bed.
I noticed unusual, faint light patterns in the night sky, like long spikes coming from the North. It was not the Milky Way, we can see every clear night. Color was mostly gray slightly pink. Wondered what was that ... My first aurora !!!
> It was not the Milky Way, we can see every clear night.
I'm exceedingly jealous. I don't think I've ever lived somewhere that I could see it, no matter how clear the night. Looking at images of "north america at night" vs "europe at night" I can see why.
With the milky way it's the same thing as the auroras. I went camping in the middle of nowhere USA, and on a clear night you can absolutely not see the milkyway the way it's portrayed in photos. It looks waaaaaaaaay less clear. You need a very long exposure camera to see it the same way as on the internet. The only difference with Europe is that I saw more stars, but none of those nebulas.
Not entirely true, I was out hiking in the mountains of Colorado, and that was the best Milky Way view I’ve ever seen. It looked just like the crazy photos with millions of stars. Just laid on a rock staring at it for an hour
Most of Europe == Not covered by light polution. (and specific areas)
(it's orange outside and it's sodium vapor related)
edit: kind of whish I was at my parent's place. It's a lot less poluted but no go here; nw europe densly populated, we also have the artificial sunrise here 24/7 by means of greenhouses.
> we also have the artificial sunrise here 24/7 by means of greenhouses.
That's a Dutch thing. You can choose between being a great exporter of unripe, tasteless tomatoes, or seeing Aurora Borealis, but you can't have both..
This is what I could see with my camera in the east of the Netherlands, and even with the naked eye I could easily see some red at times: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl
I was in middle of nowhere Sweden last week but the number of daylight hours are so high that far north that even in the dead middle of the night the sky is still blue
From the ground I cannot see it (I'm a bit north of london latitude wise so it should be better), and we have nicely combination of areas of greenhouses and petrochemical companies burning off here so it might be far worse than central london unfortunately. I'm not too high up but my view north is quite ok ... and unnatural orangeish and void of any pink.
This also appears to be happening in the southern hemisphere as well and growing brighter. My layman understanding is auroras are the result of coronal mass ejections interacting with Earth's atmosphere, but I don't recall these incidents being large enough to be so visible in the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.
This is the biggest storm since 2003! We hit a G5 on the SWPC geomagnetic storm reading, and my team had to power down components on our satellites to keep them safe!
Like, visible visible? I’m a lot farther north than that and if I hadn’t known there was something going on, I’d not have noticed it. It kinda shows up on camera, but naked eye viewing is not even worth a walk to the nearest window. Nothing to see, really.
Having your eyes dark-adapted (even a bit) makes a big difference. Here (Maine) I couldn't see anything out the window, or much of anything stepping outside, but after two minutes could see large-scale aurora across the entire sky, despite being near a bunch of streetlights and passing cars.
> The earth's magnetic field is decaying at an exponential rate as the poles shift.
Got any scientific sources for that claim?
> I believe we've spent far too much time worrying about CO2 and not nearly enough worrying about the dangers from our sun.
Other than hardening our power grid to the effects of solar storms, what exactly could we do WRT the sun and the magnetic field?
Also, given our serious lack of progress on climate change targets and the glacial pace (pun intended) at which it has been accepted as 1) real and 2) anthropogenic, I think saying 'too much time' is inaccurate.
I wonder what you (or any of us) would like to say to N. J. Ayuk, Executive Chairman at the African Energy Chamber:- (his words, not mine)
“Africans don’t hate Oil and Gas companies. We love Oil and today we love gas even more because we know gas will give us a chance to industrialize. No country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see Oil and Gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. The demonization of oil and gas companies will not work.”
and this is very far from an isolated opinion in the developing world. Given the amount of Western human capital applied to reducing dependence on fossil fuel it's a somewhat sobering experience to take a look at the Mauna Loa CO2 rate of increase. Can you see any significant decrease in recent years. I can't.
2) type in "Is the earth's magnetic field weakening?"
3) read the summary and click the sources if you don't believe it.
Read this about your CO2. The CO2 in our atmosphere is already at a concentration where the narrow band of wavelengths CO2 absorbs is fully saturated. This means more CO2 isn't going to cause more warming, because there is no more light in its opaque wavelengths to absorb. Also the pattern of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere vs surface temperature does not indicated that CO2 causes warming, but that CO2 levels rise after warming has already occurred. Policy around CO2 is hindering human progress and has caused massive economic damage. The models were all wrong, and this paper explains the reason.
I'm in the southern hemisphere (near Antarctica) and the sight is absolutely insane, almost terrifying... its a bright red aurora. Never seen anything like it.
Many of the photos here show it in such vivid colour, but for me the really breathtaking part was the scale and movement of the aurora.
Last night (here in Quebec) the entire sky was filled with colour. It's not as intense in person, but the slow shimmer of it is otherworldly. I was up on my roof for almost an hour, watching the blobs undulate in the sky. I think it made a bigger impression on me than the recent eclipse.
There is a lot to see and to follow. I just came back inside after snapping pics since just after dark here in N Texas. We had a good show that started off behind the clouds but it was bright enough to shine through the clouds. Then a few hours later after the clouds cleared it was great. My camera battery quit on me. I used three cameras tonight and only really got usable photos from my iphone, whose camera I normally hate because it always seems to process images after I take them. Part of it is probably on me since I haven't taken the time to study how to optimize settings.
Anyway. Tomorrow should be another good day for this. Keep your eyes on the sky!
Yes, you can use the NOAA forecast site which will show the "oval" and has 24 hour/30min predictions. Or Space Weather Live has some location forecasts. Generally if you don't live at a high latitude you need a very strong display to see anything. There's usually a bit of warning for storms like this, as various solar observation satellites can beam back images of the CME faster than the solar wind takes to get here.
The keywords to use are “space weather forecast <country>”
Went about an hour north of Vancouver BC Canada to get away from bit city lights and watch.
It was probably not the brightest small strands I've ever seen - if my memories of Northern Saskatchewan as a kid are still accurate - but I don't think I've seen the whole sky light up to such an extent.
magenta and green colours were clearly visible in person during the intense periods, although obviously not as bright or intense as long exposure photos. Solidly visible bands for at least the two hours I stayed out.
Source? I believe it depends on what part of the magnetic field the CME hits. There are more people living closer to the north pole which might give that impression initially.
Here in Australia I leaned pretty quickly from other local Aurora chasers not to rely on Kp, which is relevant to North America only. Instead I use the global storm strength and the Hobart magnometer readings.
Where do people get their forecasts? I often use this one, but it's not very usable outside Norway. Great if you click into each forecast (click the image) and get more details. Like how it actually covers the sky in that location. So that I can use that to plan (doesn't matter if it's strong if it's in a direction I can't see it) https://site.uit.no/spaceweather/data-and-products/aurora/os...
Some weather services also have a kp index, but I often feel those can't be trusted, and don't tell the whole story. And aurora is quite hit or miss, so need more updated data.
I have an app on my phone (AuroraNotifier) that chimes when there's hope. And then I use these others to plan a bit better. But some more interactive map akin to the uit.no one but where I can place myself around would be nice.
Generally I wake up and assess which of my body parts are experiencing issues. Pressure differentials play havoc upon internal pockets. Other than that I go outside and feel the temperature and humidity and witness the general movement (or abcence of movement) of cloud formations. I smell the air. Surprisingly, these sensations are pretty close to accurate when it comes to predicting local weather.
I am not sure how to do that for space weather yet.
I didn't see anything with the naked eye (UK), probably too much light pollution, but I took a photo of the sky with my phone and you could definitely see it.
Checking in from Detroit here… the aurora is actually super visible on the iPhone camera. Much more than from the naked eye (although they are slightly visible… I have a lot of light pollution around me though.)
I’m curious what causes it to come in better in my iPhones sensors… different wavelengths perhaps?
The longer exposure doesn’t seem to affect other aspects of the night sky though, I can see stars way better with the naked eye than my phone will show. That’s probably just because of stars being point sources and hard for the camera to focus on in an otherwise black night sky.
Another factor is color - our eyes don’t notice it well in low light, so the patches don’t stand out. Camera sensor is equally sensitive to colors at all brightness levels.
The sky has been lighting up in North America too. I’ve heard reports of the aurora from New England and, here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s currently visible by naked eye and striking in long exposure shots. I always thought I would have to visit Alaska or Scandinavia to see the northern lights, never thought I could catch a glimpse so close to home.
Keep in mind, this is only a 30 minute leading forecast. And day-night status has a strong effect on the ionosphere, to the extent that radio stations have different regulated broadcast power day versus night, and amateur radio folks bounce radio off it at night.
Scotland, 56 degrees north. I expected to see the aurora near the northern horizon, but it was visible east, west and even south, from 11:00pm (2200hrs UTC) until 12:15am (2315UTC). Easily visible to the naked eye. Took good photos on 1 second exposures, ISO 2500.
You can see the effects of the CME on the HF amateur radio bands.
This live map (https://g7vrd.co.uk/wspr/IO81) would usually be full of worldwide contacts being reported by WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter), but the solar flares have closed down the bands quite considerably.
We went out to Simpson Springs in Utah to see the borealis. There was a bit of a flare up. Like others have said it looked like streaky fog to the naked eye. My camera picked up something a little better. My wife's camera was a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S21 and she picked up gold it looks so good on her camera but anyway here's my shot.
Anyone know of sources/sites that track the magnitude of geomagnetic storms as a time series? (interested to gauge the magnitude of recent ones relative to those of the past, similarly to how we may do so for earthquakes)
The EM disturbance to Earth (Dst) of Carrington was -1000, whereas this one was -250. But the flare that produced Carrington was estimated to be an X80, whereas our max was around an X3.98. I think that means that Carrington produced around 0.008 W/m^2 of X-ray flux whereas ours produced around 0.0004
The non-linear effect (20x weaker flare only 4x less effect) is accounted for by how Earth's magnetic field has weakened in the ~165 years since Carrington.
That’s what I want to know but everybody just talks about how pretty it is. I want to know if it was dangerous to our electronics, and if not then how close it came to being dangerous, you know, small things like that.
By the time you cannot use Internet, it’s too late—and it won’t be all over the news because guess how we make/broadcast/receive them. Worst case you won’t even get a radio transmission through.
I heard the aurora would be visible in Netherland, so living in Amsterdam I just went outside to check. Nothing. Maybe some very vague lighter bands in some places? Cities have too much light for this sort of thing.
I saw visible pink bands from my balcony in Amsterdam, showing bright pink fading to green when looking through my iPhone. And yes, lots of light pollution here. Shows how crazy strong this northern light was.
I'm on a trip visiting my friend in Central Finland and yesterday we had a 96% warning for aurora chance. Unfortunately, for us, the sky was quite cloudy and we didn't get a chance to see the lights. When we were heading back home I saw a faint line of blueish-purple in the sky, which seemed unusual, and told my friends "hey what if this is the aurora". I checked the photos from the other people that claimed they saw the lights and it checked out with what I've seen.
This aurora was really powerful! I could see it with a naked eye from a town in central Poland, despite cloudy weather and light pollution. Feels great to finally see it in person
Can't see it from where I am in North Carolina as it's sadly overcast, but I'm sseeing photos from friends as far south as Georgia and Alabama of vivid pink auroras.
Use a tripod and use a remote or set a 2 second delay on your shutter press if you start using longer exposures at low iso (anything longer than 1/10 of a second IMO)
Settings really depend on the effect you are trying to capture:
- if you want to try and capture it like your eye sees it: high iso (as high as you can stand) and aim for between 1/500 and 1/30.
- if you want to capture a more painterly look with the whole sky colored in: low iso (I’d start at 200) and long exposure >3 seconds. Probably between 3 and 30 seconds depending on the available light.
Those should get you started to experiment and find what you like. Enjoy!
Oh yea. Turn off the focus light, turn off the screen, and turn off the red blinking indicators. Turn all the lights off so you can preserve your night vision.
Don't be afraid of Iso, you might want manual focus, mirrorless cameras even as good as the R5 have a hard time focusing on "nothing at infinity". Largest aperture your lens can do (biggest hole, smallest f number) and the recommended shutter speeds.
I had luck with iso 3200, f1.4 and 1/6s shutter handheld on a sony a7iv with a 35mm f1.4 GM.
I missed it last night, but I heard it will repeat it tonight. I'm going to try to see it. It's unheard of at this latitute, currently I'm on an island in Tuscany, center of Italy.
Edit: I found online that the last one visible from Italy was in 2003, so not unheard of but still rare.
I live in a relatively big city where light pollution is obviously a huge thing. But the aurora was so strong that even we were able to make it out, although not as intensively beautiful as on all those webcam feeds
Just saw it in downtown Chicago (by the lake). Faint, but visible with naked eye. Easier to capture with my pixel 8 than with my (handheld) DSLR, even with a fast lens...kicking myself for not grabbing my tripod
Fellow Chicagoan here! I went down one of the piers and saw it as well. At first it looked like cirrus clouds but the colors emerged as my eyes acclimated. I thought it was my brain hallucinating the details it expected but my phone validated what I was seeing. Truly stunning even with just a 2sec exposure.
Saw it in N Texas between dark +15minutes and about 2:30 this morning. Really nice. I've waited since 2003 to see another from my front yard. I caught the big ones during that last solar max including the X27 flare auroras. This show came from a merging of several X-class flares in quick succession. There was an X5.7 today that may also give us a show in 2-3 days depending on whether it had an earth-directed component.
spaceweather.com
spaceweatherlive.com
other links in related posts also have additional sites to track things like this. Good luck.
It really depends how far south you are and how strong the solar storm will get. You should look for some dark place close up. But it might be, that it is only visible on the northern parts of the US. Even seeing it there is quite uncommon.
To the naked eye it was a slight purple, pink, red tinge to the northern sky. With a 3 second exposure on my phone camera it was vivid purple to pink.
To really see it you need a short timed exposure with aperture opened up on the camera - so small F-stop or high-speed film setting for low light, >800 speed.
I am right outside a huge metro area and directly in front of me there is a large warehouse facility with floodlights on all night long. In spite of this I could see the slight color change in the clouds (it was very cloudy here until nearly the end of the show) since the normal light color tends towards blues and oranges depending on how far off of north you are looking.
I saw red curtains here back in 2003 during a storm that also was visible in Mexico. I knew where I needed to be in my yard to be able to see things. That display began a little east of north and walked slowly west until it faded. With that in mind, that is how I started watching for lighting changes this time. The auroral oval moves from east to west during these events and for me here in N Texas it appears to be visible only for about 20 degrees either side of north before it fades. In general, if the oval extends to Kansas or into Oklahoma then we have a shot at seeing something down here since we can see the upper atmosphere from this distance. It's a bit like trying to photograph sprites above thunderstorms in that you need to be a long way away from the storm to be able to see the activity above it. I did take a photo behind me to the south and it shows aurora too so that is how I knew this was a powerful storm that would be visible a lot farther south than my place.
We should have more of these events over the next 2-3 years so keep your eyes open. Find Polaris at your location and monitor space weather reports to get a feel for the likelihood that you can see something there.
Went out into a meadow near town last night. Couldn't see a thing. Light pollution was probably too bad. But it was really funny to see a bunch of people milling about in the meadow at almost midnight. Many of them idiots walking around with phone torches destroying their and everyone else's night vision.
The shocking thing to me, though, is the number of satellites in the sky. This was a shit sky, way beyond what people would call "milky". Hardly any stars visible. But everywhere you looked there were satellites. I remember it being rare to see one only 15 years ago. Almost couldn't believe you could really see them back then. But now... Everywhere. I had no idea how congested it was getting up there. Wish I could leave Earth. But also glad we can't because we'd fuck that up too.
Realistically only about half an hour. There are instruments at the L1 lagrange point that can measure the properties of the solar wind and/or CME as they pass and allowed real informed responses to events.
There are also very, very simplified CME propagation models (WSA-ENLIL, etc) that can start with some assumptions and give a reasonable idea about when the CME will arrive within ~12 hours.
But for every time the simulations succesfully predict severe geomagnetic events or the like they give false positives a couple dozen times. The simulations cannot predict the geoeffectiveness.
I just found out that if you select a webcam you can actually go back in time, or even do a 'backwards timelapse' from the view menu. There's also a 'best of' which seems to have a collection of quite nice shots from all webcams: https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/bestof/
It’s known that the magnetic core is generating/sustaining the magnetic field, which means that anything that happens to the field, has some sort of counterpart in the core
So it would be cool to have that data: what happens inside Earth’s core when a big magnetic event is affecting it’s magnetic field
It started with white broad streaks, which most of all looked like fog, but then perhaps after 10 minutes or so, we saw colors of red, purple and green begin to emerge from the these streaks. Most astoundingly it all seemed to emanate from a fluctuating point in the middle of the sky. If you looked closely at this point you could see it fall into itself, morphing and shifting continuously.
We went around the house and we could purple streaks at the top and orange to red patches at the bottom of the sky.
Colors observed: Whitish blue, Green, Purple, Red, and Orange
An absolutely a beautiful experience.