Northern Lights.. in the Modwest?

[JJ.G0ldD0t]

http://www.spaceweather.com/

wow man.. that's pretty crazy.
Arkansas:

http://spaceweather.com/submissions/pics/b/Brian-Emfinger-10251101_1319508192.jpg
More at the link

ps- any mod wanna fix my fat-fingered title?

it was midnight :/ sry

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

Great photos. Very bright. Lots of sun activity now.

[keehah]

Many observers, especially in the deep south, commented on the pure red color of the lights they saw. These rare all-red auroras sometimes appear during intense geomagnetic storms.
I smell a SpaceGoatFart. >:D
Or a Comet tail? :confused:

From the spaceweather link:

The Rare Red Aurora Article #918 by Carla Helfferich (http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF9/918.html)
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks

In a typical auroral display, the light is a mixture of many colors. There's actually a fair bit of blue, but the human eye doesn't pick it up very well. We see much better in the green part of the spectrum, and there is a strong yellowish-green component in the light of a usual aurora, so we often see green displays. Green auroras, and green auroras with a reddish lower border, occur at an altitude near 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the earth.

Rare, all-red auroras occur much higher, at 300 to 500 kilometers altitude and are associated with a large influx of electrons. These electrons are moving too slowly to penetrate deeply into the atmosphere: they actually have less energy than the electrons that create more common auroras.

At this high altitude, the electrons lose their energy only to the most abundant constituent, oxygen atoms. The process produces light as pure as that from a laser; there's no mixture of colors to confound the eye. Instead, light is produced at exactly 6300 and 6364 angstrom units on the spectrum, and we see true red aurora.

Auroral scientists do not yet fully understand the cause of pure red aurora. They know it is associated with intense solar activity and heating of the upper atmosphere from a large influx of low-energy electrons; they have not yet explained the mechanism producing this occurrence.

The most impressive red aurora visible in North America during the last half-century occurred on February 11, 1958. And it really was visible in North America, seen in California and even Florida. In Alaska, the show lasted nearly all night. The red light in the sky was so intense it made the snow on the ground gleam red.

[Bigjon]

funny, must have skipped minnesota 600 + miles north.

[JJ.G0ldD0t]

you must have missed the "more at the link" part.



"Wow, wow, wow! These were the best Northern Lights I've seen since 2004," says Shawn Malone, who took this picture from the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan:

http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images2011/24oct11/shawn-malone3_strip.jpg (http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_01oct11.htm?PHPSESSID=1l43vreacduq2glvp0f6 njbv52)

"The auroras filled the sky in every direction--even to the south," he says.

Indeed, the display spread all the way down to Arkansas. "When I saw the alert, I ran outside and immediately saw red auroras (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Brian-Emfinger-10251101_1319508192.jpg)," reports Brian Emfinger from the city of Ozark. "Within a few minutes the auroras went crazy! Unbelievable!"

Auroras were seen or photographed in more than half of all US states including Alabama (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Jonathon-Stone-IMG_2486_1319526395.jpg), Wisconsin (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Randy-Halverson-IMG_7266_1319514782.jpg), New Mexico (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Jan-Curtis-curtis1_1319512266.jpg), Tennessee (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Yvette-Thomas-IMG_1388c_1319508436.jpg), Missouri (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Tobias-Billings-IMG_5351-1_1319508755.jpg), Illinois (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Beau-Dodson-1northernlights_1319516691.jpg), Nebraska (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Bob-S-Matzen-Tonight01_1319513840.jpg), Kentucky (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Larry-W.-Smith-IMG_45011a_1319511319.jpg), North Carolina (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Jayme-Hanzak-Aurora20111024a_1319513271.jpg), Indiana (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Chad-Bauman-barn-gme_1319508815.jpg), Oklahoma (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Ricky-Steele-IMG_2760_1319513839.jpg), Kansas (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=jim-hammer-aurora2md_1319514493.jpg), Iowa (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Steve-Yezek-IMG_8062_1319512546.jpg), Maryland (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Kaidi-IMG_7589a_1319507972.jpg), New York (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Elliot-Severn-Aurora-allsky_1319523110.jpg), Montana (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Joseph-Shaw-PIC_4313_adj_30p_1319526506.jpg), Ohio (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Jasper-Mitchin-DSC_0226-2_1319508431.jpg), Colorado (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Paul-Robinson-Aur102411_68_1319517743.jpg), Pennsylvania (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Lisa-Marie-Ford-LMF_2047_1319524264.jpg), Washington (http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Nathan-Biletnikoff-OrcasAurora102411_reduced_1319526171.jpg), Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Arkansas and California. Many observers, especially in the deep south, commented on the pure red color of the lights they saw. These rare all-red auroras (http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF9/918.html) sometimes appear during intense geomagnetic storms. They occur some 300 to 500 km above Earth's surface and are not yet fully understood.

[Awoke]

Beautiful!

[Bigjon]

you must have missed the "more at the link" part.

Nothing happened in southern Minnesota. The shores of lake Superior, Michigan are 250 - 280 miles north of here.

Last time i saw the big show was in 1977, lambing time, late February southern Minnesota.

Must have been cloudy.

[Santa]

Beautiful!

The last word.

[Son-of-Liberty]

We saw some pretty intense northern lights last night here in Alberta. Best I have seen in a few years for sure.

[keehah]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VIitTNFJ-vI

Stopped checking the solar weather the last few days. The internet version of what plagues so much backyard comet watching.

DailyMailUK: Freak solar activity creates incredible Northern Lights (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053382/Northern-Lights-seen-far-south-Arkansas-freak-solar-activity.html#ixzz1bsDUTyqc)

The coronal mass ejection from the Sun hit Earth's magnetosphere at about 2 p.m. ET, SpaceWeather.com reported.
The impact caused a strong compression in the magnetic field, allowing electrically charged particles from the solar wind to penetrate down to geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles or 35,000 kilometers in altitude).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/strange-solar-storm-sparks-northern-lights-that-dipped-into-deep-south-for-a-surprise-sky-show/2011/10/25/gIQAu7HjGM_story.html

In Arkansas, Brian Emfinger called the view “extremely vivid, the most vivid I have ever seen. There was just 15 to 20 minutes where it really went crazy.”

Emfinger, a storm chaser, captured the vibrant nighttime images on camera in Ozark, Ark.

He called it “a much bigger deal” than a tornado” because he sees dozens of those every year. This is only the second northern lights in a decade that he has seen this far south.

“They are very rare events,” said NASA scientist Bill Cooke, who found the aurora photos in the Alabama camera’s archive and posted them on the Marshall Space Flight Center’s blog. “We don’t see them this far south that often.”

Officials at the federal Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., said they were surprised at the southern reach. The center monitors solar storms, which trigger auroras.

Space weather forecast chief Bob Rutledge said given the size of the solar storm, the lights probably shouldn’t have been visible south of Iowa. The storm was only considered “moderate” sized, he said.

He called the storm unusual, its effects reaching Earth eight hours faster than forecast. But that timing made it just about perfect for U.S. viewing, he said.

...Often solar storms can cause damage satellites and power grids. This one didn’t, Rutledge said.

[keehah]

http://spaceweather.com/

As night fell over North America, auroras spilled across the Canadian border into the contiguous United States. A US Department of Defense satellite photographed the crossing:
http://spaceweather.com/aurora/images2011/24oct11b/Paul-McCrone3_strip.jpg
"This shows the auroras on Oct. 25th at 0140 GMT," says Paul McCrone of the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey, California. He created the image using visual and infrared data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's F18 polar orbiter. DMSP satellites carry low light cameras for nightime monitoring of moonlit clouds, city lights and auroras. Some of the auroras recorded by the F18 on Oct. 25th were as bright as the city lights underneath.

This "big picture" from orbit makes sense of what happened next. The bright band swept south and, before the night was over, auroras were sighted in more than thirty US states...

The CME was so geoeffective because it contained a knot of south-pointing magnetic fields. These fields partially cancelled Earth's north-pointing magnetic field at the equator, allowing solar wind plasma to penetrate deeply into Earth's magnetosphere.