For the first time in my life tonight, I saw the Northern Lights!!!
And if that wasn’t enough, it happened under unique circumstances. I was flying a small plane this evening with my girlfriend. We had gone for dinner about an hour away, and shortly after takeoff we had a (relatively) near miss with another plane. She was a bit shaken by this, although we weren’t all that close.
It was dark for our return flight. I entered the landing pattern at our airport, which is fairly rural. The runway faces north, so when I turned onto our final approach we were confronted with a spectacular green and red tower of light. It filled up the whole windshield of the plane.
My GF was looking out the side window when I yelled, “Oh my God!!!” She thought I saw another airplane on a collision course, then saw what I was looking at.
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/today2.html shows the K[sub]p[/sub] index is currently at 6. It was up to 7, which indicates aurora should be visible from here in Chicago. A local monitor has only given an alert of 1 (max 3).
Saw it last night, North of Boston. Mostly a strong red glow with a few green rays thrown in for variety. It’s probably been ten years since I saw them last.
Yup, they were out early and bright here in the UP of Michigan. About 9:30 at night they were all over the sky, green and red. A great treat for Mr. Athena’s sister visiting from Texas!
Oho, so that’s what that was! Wow, I did see them! My boyfriend and I were driving in the country at about 9:40PM on Saturday night when we saw them. He saw them first, and commented on a large, pink striated glow. It really was cool. We stopped the car in the middle of the road (no traffic at that hour way out there) to look.
He’d seen them before, but I never had. He guessed that they were the aurora, but then we thought we might be too far south to see it. We figured instead that Martians had landed and that we would soon be mindless slaves. Then we went to McDonald’s to await the invasion.
Well, more or less. The solar cycle is actually around 11 years and corresponds to sunspot activity. Sunspots have complicated magnetic fields that are correlated with flare activity (http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/flaremag.htm).
The last time I saw the aurora was at the peak of the cycle in 1989. (This was actually a two day show in March 1989 that was one of the five or six periods of highest auroral activity this century, at least in the continental US.) The peak of the latest cycle was actually predicted to be in the year 2000. There were, in fact, some periods of good auroral activity, but I managed to miss them all. (Lots of cloudy weather!)
This particular show was due to a well-placed coronal hole and a southern deflection in the Earth’s magnetic field. It seems to have been something of a fluke in that no one predicted this kind of low-latitude auroral activity.