On Thursday, October 4, the sun spit out a surge of solar winds and magnetic fields that hurtled towards the Earth at around 400 miles per second, causing a geomagnetic storm when it hit. This might sound scary, but the truth of the matter is, this geomagnetic storm gave us one of nature's most enigmatic streaks of beauty across our skies: the Northern Lights.
The coronal mass ejection (CME) hit the Earth early in the morning of October 8, lighting up the skies with extremely bright auroras.
A release from NASA read:
"At Earth, when the CME connected up with Earth's magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, it caused a space weather phenomenon called a geomagnetic storm. This storm was categorized by NOAA as a G2 - on a scale from G1 to G5. A storm at this level is considered reasonably mild. Auroras did appear in the north, including Canada, due to this storm."
Website SpaceWeather also states that people living at a high latitude can hopefully see the residual effects on the Northern Lights tonight, Tuesday, October 9. The National Weather Service has stated there is a chance of more clouds and fog tonight, but let's keep our fingers crossed that those of us who missed the auroras will still have a chance.
Photographer Beth Allen had this to say on SpaceWeather about tha auroras that erupted just after midnight on October 8, "The Auroras outside of Edmonton, Alberta were so bright for a while that it was easy to walk around in the field I was standing in. The lights were moving so fast and were so crisp that it felt like I could reach out and touch them. Really astounding!"
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