Hi there,
a few pics on Auroras borealis from the southern tip of South-America (Punta Arenas, Chile):
Here a few - current - pics (note: this is not sunset, but an aurora at midnight)
While they seem to be mostly green on the nothern extremes, the aurora here on the extreme south seems to be red. Is there a reason for this (e.g. magnetic north-pole vs. magnetic south-pole)?
I’ve seen pink lights here in Canada.
thx … add on Q:
what determines the wavelenght of the light of a A.B. then?
The kinds of air molecules it is reacting with which is mostly determined by altitude if I remember what I was told on the cruise I went on.
Apparently they were visible - and mostly red - on the south coast of England the other night.
The Aurora Australis also tends to be green. Basically (actual chemists and meteorologists please correct me), when the solar wind interacts with the upper atmosphere, the Aurora will appear green as the mostly oxygen molecules get excited from the interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field and the ionized particles in the solar wind. Last night, there was A LOT of solar wind from the coronal ejection a couple of days ago, so the solar wind penetrated relatively deep into the atmosphere and the mostly nitrogen molecules got excited, which tend to glow read.
I may have gotten the gases backwards.
Also, I could see the Aurora (via my phone camera) in Tennessee last night. That’s how powerful the solar storm was.
That would be quite the feat. Sure its not the Aurora Australis?
My recent reading indicates that both red and green aurora emissions are from energetic particles activating oxygen atoms, but red only happens at fairly high altitude (> 300 km) because the atom takes a long time to “relax” and emit red light, and at low altitudes the energy gets discharged as chemical reactions instead of light because of the greater density. Whereas green aurora is lower altitude (100 to 300 km) because the energy level discharges as light more quickly and doesn’t get dissipated as much in the denser air.
Green also dominates our visual perception, so enough green might swamp out perceiving red.
Localized entirely in your South American kitchen?
That’s the glow of steamed hams.
I got red, purple, blue, and green aurora in South Carolina last night.
I saw them in the Midlands last night. The colours were dim but distinguishable with the naked eye, and the red streak was bright enough to be visible while I was driving,
Mid-latitude viewing auroa tends to the red, because you can only see the top of the aurora, which is the red bit. Very strong aurora tends to the red, because you get high-altitude (red) aurora as well as the more common low-altitude (green) aurora.
So, from Melbourne, typically all the aurora you can see is the red glow on the horizon, when there is a very large southern aurora, and we can see the top of it.
But … I think the Aurora Australis is more red and less green than the Aurora Borealis, and I don’t have an explanation for that. Is it because of the tilt of the magnetosphere, the solar horizon wrt to the magnetic horizon, the direction of spin of the suns magnetosphere, a second-order effect of the positive-charged radiation belt, or am I just wrong? I’ve never seen pictures of green Aurora Australis.
It occurs to me that there is an Ozone Hole over Antarctica.
Or because unlike in the north, the only land at high latitudes in the southern hemisphere is Antarctica, and there are very few humans there to see the aurora? Everyone else is viewing from mid latitudes.
That’s a good point. Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Sydney are all around 33°S, which is on par with Los Angeles (34°N).
I’ve seen pink auroras, but mainly green; I’m at 50°N.
Maybe at Cape Horn (55.9°S), the aurora would be green.
Although now that I check, Punta Arenas, where the OP took their photos, is at 53°S.
https://i.postimg.cc/9FkvHyw3/FB-IMG-1728753149123.jpg
(ETA that’s a chart about aurora colors. Discourse failed to embed it properly.)
I’m at 53°N; I always forget how far south most Canadians live. There are plenty of Scandinavians living above 60°N to see and photograph aurora, and I think they are mostly green up there. The very impressive ones I saw on holiday in Finland certainly were, and the ones we had in the UK earlier this year were mostly green.
I just tried Google Image searching ‘aurora australis antarctica’ and got mostly green photos, ‘aurora australis melbourne’ was a lot of red and purple, ‘aurora australis punta arenas’ was a mixture. So maybe there is something to this latitude theory.
South is port and North is starboard. Didn’t you guys learn anything in school?