If you've never seen the northern lights, it's really worth finding any excuse to go do. Videos can give you an idea of what it's like, but there's something deep in the animal brain that reacts to the sky being full of shimmering, spooky light, that is really impossible to describe or to capture on film.
Just like a solar eclipse, the aurora is one of those celestial phenomena that you really have to experience firsthand, at least once in your life. It's worth the hassle!
I'm living in aurora country, and not really seeing what's the big deal with some green streaks in the sky.
On the other hand I've heard the point made that if a clear night sky was as rare as northern lights or an eclipse, people would similarly be freaking out about it as a life-changing almost religious primal experience.
It's very easy to take this stuff for granted, I guess is what I'm saying.
> On the other hand I've heard the point made that if a clear night sky was as rare as northern lights or an eclipse, people would similarly be freaking out about it as a life-changing almost religious primal experience.
Which of course they are in large cities. And city dwellers often do have such a reaction to a clear night sky in a dark place where you can actually see all the stars.
Haha yeah, I remember a friend of mine from Seoul coming to visit me and looking with wonder at the stars in the night sky. It’s so easy to take these things for granted.
> On the other hand I've heard the point made that if a clear night sky was as rare as northern lights or an eclipse, people would similarly be freaking out about it as a life-changing almost religious primal experience.
Can't really agree - I still enjoy a good Aurora display - but of course my bar for "wow" is raised to clear night, little light pollution and being blessed by looking right up into the corona - along with some great colors (not just green).
Last winter I had the good fortune to go for a walk and catching the corona right behind my house (on a side I can't see the sky from inside - due to window placement and trees). Beautiful.
if you've never seen snow in your life, and then see it for the first time, say as an adult, it is quite an experience. same for the wide sea/ocean/beach.
I too live in aurora country (grew up in Northern Alberta), and while it does stop being novel every once in a while it can still surprise. I can still remember a night 20 years ago when the sky was a bright red, stretching from the horizon to directly overhead. It was quite spooky.
I've lived there too, and I can't understand those who don't see the wonder of an amazing Aurora from time to time. Now add to this that the Aurora is a perfect excuse to go do some physics experiments with magnets and lasers. ;) Those tools are the basis for some prediction of bursts of Aurora. That and ofc the visual observation of changes on the surface of the Sun, especially concerning solar flare activity.
I live above latitude 65 degrees so auroras are quite common. Few years ago I had to deliberately go out and seek location without light pollution and watch auroras because I wasn't sure anymore if I had actually seen them live.
Now I atleast remember the delighted screams of tourists that were taking photos there.
Just be aware that the saturated colors seen on photographs are an artifact of the medium and the vidoes making it look like fireworks are typically sped-up.
It can’t really be captured om film - and what you see on film is quite different.
When the Aurora is strong, you can see subtle undulations. It will hang down like a velvet curtain from the sky, subtly moving like in a faint breeze. When I was a kid, we'd whistle for the Aurora, to make it dance. But according to the folksy (and fun) superstition, you should avoid waving to it with a white handkerchief, lest it come down and sweep you away into the heavens, where you'd be forever trapped in the castles of the sky. Some would still wave white handkerchiefs for that very reason though, if for no other reason than to tempt fate. ;)
I've done a lot of time-lapse of Aurora, which accentuates the moves. These days, however, the ISO and light sensitivity of cameras has gotten so good that you can indeed film the Aurora at regular shutter speeds and still get a really good result. I think we'll see more interesting (and perhaps more scientific) presentations of the phenomena in the future due to that fact. Or one may at least hope!
I too whistled at the Aurora Borealis to encourage them. It was legend that if you were overzealous, then the lights could become agitated and come down and cut off your head.
I am from Interior Alaska. Later in life, I heard this same story from someone from Gambell, Alaska in the Bering Sea. That is when it dawned on me, that if you are outside whistling for too long, someone/something might come and cut off your head. Interior Alaskans and Coastal Alaskans used to kidnap each other with enough regularity to give precedence to such legends.
It's too bad they aren't easier to plan around. I looked into going to Iceland once and it was like " there might be an aurora." As I recall, it's less of a seasonal thing and more sheer luck. (I know the weather is hard to predict in general.)
If you come to the North of Norway between the end of December and the start of February, you'll usually see it if you stick around for more than a week. The biggest problem up North is really the weather. It's often cloudy, and for that reason the months prior December, and after February, aren't really good for spotting the Aurora. Also you'll want to camp out somewhere away from light pollution. I mean, I saw it often enough within the city limits of Tromsø, but you'll get a completely different experience if you go into the mountains, say at some research station, or to some remote fishing village by the sea. Add to this that January and February are usually the coldest months up there, with temps that can stretch below -20° Celsius / -4 Fahrenheit so bring warm clothing and a thermos with hot chocolate!
Go to Iceland anyway you won't regret it from its community geothermal bathing culture (how each neighborhood socializes after work) to the many amazing outdoor wonders to its capital city, Reykjavík. If your American visiting there its eye opening!
I didn't see the lights but fell in love with Iceland. If you really want to see them you have to hunt and chase them! Like tonight Alaska is the place to be!
When were you there last? While I agree with everything else you say, Reykjavik has over the last decade or so unfortunately turned into a city of souvenir shops and tourist trap restaurants. Personally I wouldn't 'budget' more than 24 hours of an Iceland vacation to Reykjavik.
I'm American and it was my first trip to a European country. I was there for two weeks in January. It's a different and personally a better world there then here in the US due to its small population..little to no crime ..unable to carry a gun..their citizens are well taken care of. I went on a few dates with some locals while there and it was eye opening to hear their view of the US. With many saying they use to want to come to the US but do not want to cause of guns/school shootings. I was like nah it's not that bad your media is overselling you yet a week later I come home and have a crazy gunman in my woods/my backyard who just shot up police.
Unfortunately the US will never get to be the utopia that is Iceland in terms of safety and taking care of its citizens so crime doesn't need to be committed. It's too big with half the population just thinking like their parents and grandparents do or did vs. thinking hmm I'm open minded to see how other countries work.
Heck, I went in 2017, which is just about when the low cost airlines there started to pick up and tourists started flocking over. But even back then I wouldn't recommend spending more than 2 days in Reykjavik when you have such an amazing country to explore.
Yeah WoW Airlines was the Icelandic budget airline now it's Play Airlines. Which was solid for a little more then a few hundred dollars round trip. I just brought my luggage onboard with me as I hear they lose luggage.
> As I recall, it's less of a seasonal thing and more sheer luck. (I know the weather is hard to predict in general.)
I think it's largely due to "weather" on the Sun (although I believe you also need it to be a clear night on Earth in order to be able to see it properly)
Not quite midnight sun, but one of the most magical experiences of my life was staying up all night on the side of a proglacial river and watching the sun go down... just to have it come up again an hour or so later a couple mountains to the right. It never even fully went down, which is why I never fully went to sleep.
I live in such an area. The sun technically goes down for a few hours every night in the summer - but it stays just below the horizon. I can read outside at night, and it is more akin to night being a few hours of early sunset that bleeds into late sunrise.
It was honestly more magical 9 or 10 years ago when I first got here, but I still enjoy it.
Here's the best aurora forecast tool : https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast from NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
Looks like cloud free parts of Canada are in for a show (minus the most populated part).
[edited, thank you, anthomtb]
I like taking photos of the aurora, and I often use NOAA's forecasts to plan sightings.
I wanted the forecast in a simple non-video format, and was tired of doing the mental math converting from UTC, so I made my own tool to show Kp forecast values (from NOAA) in the user's local timezone. Here it is in case it can be useful to anyone else:
Obviously, it's pretty bare bones. You need to have an understanding of which Kp value is needed to see the lights at your latitude. I'm working on adding more features to make it more user friendly
Nice one. Would be nice to have it location based, not just adjust to timezone.
Another great tool from over here that I've made use of a lot is Tromsø Geophysical Observatory's magnetometer stackplots page[1], but not for forecasting obviously.
A nice page, but I highly suggest to add a hint which timezone it shows.
I opened it and was totally frustrated to not knew if it's UTC, my timzone or something else.
He had me come in each morning and go over the logs for the servers on our VOIP product - which fed to a line-printer (dot matrix) in real-time and would spit out a ton of paper. (as much as I hated this, I love the sound of dot-matrix printers)
I had to go through the logs with a highlighter and highlight out anything suspicious...
This was the mid-late 90s and we were one of the few companies to have already adoped Linux to production at that time.
Some of our employees were the authors of H.323 and some other protocols - and flourished out to all sorts of your streaming techs today.
Hah, reminds me of when my university account was going to be closed down (this would've been in the early 80s), and I had some files I wanted to preserve. So one evening, I sent them to the card punch, and then lugged the resulting boxes home on my bicycle.
(At this point, I've no idea what eventually became of those boxes, though...)
> Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone.
That's totally untrue. You can buy a USB floppy drive on Amazon for $20, and a pack of disks for another $20. I have two 1990s-era Power Macintosh machines with floppy drives sitting on my desk right now, they both work, as do the floppy drives.
And I was able to access some ~15-year-old floppies just a couple of years ago with no trouble.
I got some data off ~35 year old 5.25" floppies recently. I didn't have high hopes since these floppies are floppy, but they held up well and didn't give me trouble.
Optical media not an option? I mean... those are basically microscopic punch cards aren't they? I've seen some 100GB writable blue rays being sold at reasonable prices.
> Estimates of the storm strength (Dst) range from −0.80 to −1.75 µT.
So.. less than Earth's ambient magnetic field?
While low power, long distance lines (like telegraph or POTS) would be in trouble, and maaaybe some network cards would burn our due to long Ethernet wires, storage devices and many computers would be fine. If you are super worried, seal some hard drives in food tins - the frequency is pretty low so it doesn't even have to be fully airtight.
No, the GP got it right. High-frequency = short wavelengths, which can squeeze through small gaps in metal more easily than long wavelengths. (Visible light is an extreme example of this.)
Right, I wasn't thinking about it this way, and I probably wouldn't for the purpose of blocking EM. In principle, low frequency penetrates better but as you say high frequency can get into things more (but doesn't necessarily).
Of course I didn't actually look up what frequencies we're talking about- low and high can mean a lot of different things
After some searching I found this PDF presentation: "Geomagnetic Storms
and the US Power Grid" https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/fin... , which says: "GIC are Quasi DC currents" and "Moderate Storm - Electric Field at Earth’s Surface 1-5 V/km / Largest recorded 20 V/km" and
Let's assume 10x worse than largest recorded, 200 V / km.. not sure if this is physically possible but probably a worst case.
A high-voltage transmission lines would be in danger, as presentation said. Not only because of overvoltage, but also because this is injecting DC into lines designed for AC only.
A 10 km old-style telephone or telegraph line would get 2000 volt on it... this would definitely burn the equipment or set it on fire.
What about my house? The AC comes in from nearest distribution transformer ("pole pig"). The nominal output is 110V RMS (155V peak), and let's say there is ~0.6 miles (1 km) from it to my house. This will be 355V peak arriving, equivalent to 251V RMS. My appliances and lights (which were turned on) are likely gone... but many computers might survive, as modern power supplies are often rated "90-240V" for european usage (and they don't care about AC/DC mix either). And of course if you had any surge protectors in your extension cords, they'd protect your devices -- they were designed exactly for situations like those.
What about my local network? There are less then 100 meters of distance, so 20V induced voltage.. and common Ethernet is rated for 2000V, so this is going to be fine.
What about USB cords, low-voltage power cords, etc...? Well, those are shielded / have two wires right next to each other, so they would normally be unaffected. But let's say you had a bad ground connector or incompletely plugged in device, so you have a loop. In this case, 2 meter (6ft) cable would have 0.4 volts. That's within tolerances of most ICs, they'd be fine.
What about unplugged device? Your 18" laptop will develop 0.08 volts in the worst case. Most of the modern ICs run in 0-1V range, so they won't burn up (but might have some glitches if device is working). Your antennas (WIFI and 3G) would also develop extremely low voltage so they would be fine as well.
TL/DR: country-wide systems (power grid, old telegraph) is in trouble. City-wide might or might not survive. Anything smaller than a house is fine. If you are worried about second Carrington, get water, food and generator, and get some surge protectors.
Voltage is only half the story with electrical equipment. Pretty much anything you buy is designed to withstand voltages far in excess of nominal. Almost every input on an electronic device will have "transient voltage supression" ESD protection diodes which will short high voltages to ground. This is generally because of static electricity. The potential difference between a person and ground can easily reach 5kV. Generally any device you buy today will have been tested to some sort of ESD standard - often to 8kV discharge voltage.
Other tests done during electromagnetic compatibility testing (EMC) include bombarding things with radio waves, testing susceptibility to surge voltages and injecting voltages into power cables.
The key for all of these is duration and total energy. A TVS diode can deal with high voltages - but if they're sustained for too long the diode will burn up. The testing regimes all use quite low total energies.
The values you give for geomagnetically induced currents talk about volts per km. EMC testing of industrial equipment is typically done at volts per meter - a factor of 1000x greater. The industrial standards require 10 V/m, military stuff is tested at 200 V/m.
Right, and from my reading there is no strong EMC components in the solar storms. Radios are disrupted, but from ionosphere changes, not from jamming. it is mostly the weird GIE thing which is described as "quasi-DC", and also mentions "millions of amperes"
So all that EMC stuff is very important in everyday life (and it killed more than one FET :) ), but seems inapplicable for Carrington-style event. There, it will be all about huge currents and low voltages. If the wire is long enough, TVSs may burn out, capacitors may overvolt and explode, any ESD protection diodes will also get destroyed. Luckily, we don't have a lot of long-distance copper wires connected to sensitive electronics.
I am not an expert on long-distance transmission lines, but according to that presentation the failures are not caused by instantaneous overvoltage / arc-over (microseconds), but rather by DC imbalance and overheating (seconds to minutes). Which means a better protection technology can fix it, turning permanent equipment damage into temporary shutdowns.
The latest example is 1989 Quebec power blackout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm . The storm tripped some protections, that overloaded other circuits which tripped as well, and the whole province went dark. It took 90 seconds for everything to shut down, and 9 hours to restore everything. Judging by that timeline, no major equipment was damaged.
I keep reading about government mandating solar storm protection for power grids.. hopefully next time a big storm comes, we'll be more protected than Quebec in 1989.
I saw the Aurora in Oslo, Norway about a month ago. It's the first time in my life I saw it that far south. I grew up in Tromsø, where it was pretty common, but man... You never get "used" to really good Aurora. It's always amazing.
There has long been a live page from lancs.ac.uk [0] - it's currently showing the very high values from last night.
Slightly strangely - and a slight chance of being related - we've had multiple power cuts here (Sussex) throughout the night and since the last one the mains voltage is way down (182v vs the normal 230-ish according to the UPS).
I love hacker news. We geek out on aurora borealis. What I am more grateful of is that the community is so diverse ; Norway, Poland, England, Estonia, Netherlands and the list goes on.
I was reading through the comments waiting for this. It's just one of the local news sites / papers for the area, it's quite terrible in many ways really. I was very surprised to see it on HN this morning.
Try installing a pi-hole in your home network. I set one up more for curiosity than anything else, but an unexpected side effect was that these local news websites, which were previously completely unusable on mobile, suddenly became just about tolerable again.
I'm on the internet all the time and I've never---not once---seen one of these articles before the event actually happens. It's quite frustrating. It was a clear night last night. Overcast tonight.
TV has ruined the aurora. Seen them 3 times in Scandinavia and it's never been as vivid as on TV. Sitting out in the wilderness roasting things on a fire waiting for them is a great experience though.
I've always assumed that the Northern Lights were quite a common site in Tallinn?
I just looked it up and the latitude of the place I'm from in Canada is about in the middle between Tallinn and London. We usually see the Northern Lights here several times year, With exceptionally prominent displays occurring at least at least once every 2-3 years.
I did not expect how often Americans would ask me about the Northern Lights when I visited there for a few months many years ago. They were often so fascinated and slightly envious/baffled by how blasé I felt about something so incredible because it was so common to me.
The magnetic north pole is wandering pretty fast.
Currently magnetic north pole is at coordinates 86.146, 146.826 [1] - right in the arctic ocean. It is not in Canada for quite some years.
The geomagnetic north pole is the relevant one. It is located in northern Canada, around 80.7, -72.7, and moves much slower.
Your link mentions this, too:
> Based on the WMM2020 coefficients for 2020.0 the geomagnetic north pole is at 72.68°W longitude and 80.65°N latitude, […] Although geomagnetic pole positions cannot be observed, they are arguably of greater significance than the dip poles because the auroral ovals (approximate 5° latitude bands where the spectacular aurora is likely visible) are closely centered on the geomagnetic poles.
I'm also Canadian, the ones I know are not polite, maybe passive aggressive that gets confused with polite by other cultures. I've generally found Americans more polite.
I think Anglo Canadians like to think they are polite, but I have no idea where that comes from. They're certainly not polite with French speakers in any case.
What a bizarre thing to say! To most from French cultures, not speaking french is "rude". French Quebeckers will often even pretend to not know english.
Yet here we have someone claiming anglos are "rude" to french speakers? In what way?
> Yet here we have someone claiming anglos are "rude" to french speakers? In what way?
The "Speak white" in parliament is something that is hard to forget even if it was long ago now. But yes, berating French speakers for speaking French in a French-speaking province is actually rude.
In none of the "French cultures" I know, is not speaking French rude. What is rude is assuming everyone speaks your own language everywhere.
I'm not here to write an essay on cohabitation between languages in multilingual countries (which I could) though, but I would like you to read your own comment again and ask yourself whether it exudes politeness at all.
And maybe, whether your aggressive-defensive knee-jerk reaction to a mention of French speakers might be the reason Quebecers tend to consider Anglos the opposite of polite.
the latitude of the place I'm from in Canada is about in the middle between Tallinn and London.
That'd place you at about the north of England, maybe around Newcastle. I'd expect with clear skies and a dark environment to the north you'd have seen last night's display from that far south.
Once Kristian Birkeland proved how northern lights actually worked based on his theory about it, the relation between particles from the sun, earths magnetic field and the poles, a string of norwegian pioneers studied the phenomena for a few decades. Up until 1960 actually. Then, some researchers from scandinavia and US teamed up to establish a facility for launching research rockets into the aurora, as balloons could not get high enough and satellites wasn't a thing really. They agreed on Andøya in northern norway as the perfect spot for such a rocket range. It was also directly under the northern lights oval too. Then in 18th august 1962, they launched the first rocket and has done so ever since. There are still lots to learn from the sun by studying the northern lights in the polar regions. A really exciting story actually.
I was flying over from Dublin to Birmingham on Sunday evening around just after 10pm but I didn't see much out the window, would've been pretty cool if I had though.
Careful: suggesting that the sun has emitted far more thermal energy the last 150 years might give people ideas /s
On a related note: Now I am interested and I wonder if the change is big enough to make a difference on the earth and if it has been accounted for in the models.
I mean, if you plot solar activity and global temperatures, there is a correlation.
But, you've all seen those graphs of totally unrelated things that show a correlation. So, it must absolutely only be caused by humans, right? Because there's no way the most energetic thing for 100 million miles fluctuating wildly in its energy output could cause matching fluctuations in a planet's atmosphere, right?
”The amount of solar energy Earth receives has followed the Sun’s natural 11-year cycle of small ups and downs, with no net increase since the 1950s. Over the same period, global temperature has risen markedly. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past half-century.”
I mean, the amount of solar irradiance is directly correlated to the amount and activity of sunspots, which have increased steadily at roughly the same rate as average global temperatures.
It's not even something that you need secret mystical knowledge that only the woowoo anti-climate-change wonks believe in, you can get the data and do the maths on it yourself.
The James Bay network went offline in less than 90 seconds, giving Quebec its second massive power outage in 11 months.[11] The power failure lasted nine hours and forced the company to implement various mitigation strategies, including raising the trip level, installing series compensation on ultra high voltage lines and upgrading various monitoring and operational procedures. Other utilities in North America and Northern Europe and elsewhere implemented programs to reduce the risks associated with geomagnetically induced currents (GICs)
Darn it as I been chasing them recently in Iceland and this past Tuesday I got a flight to Fairbanks, AK(im in Baltimore). That flight got canceled but I could have rescheduled it. Though I caught Covid two days after.
My Aurora app says the lights should be visible in Fairbanks next Sunday and Monday, of course cloud cover kills your chances of seeing it but as of now looks partly sunny those days.
I live pretty far north in Canada and have been making nightly timelapses trying to catch the northern lights. What surprised me the most is how common they are here. Most nights, they will be visible for a few minutes or more, weather permitting.
So far today it’s clear skies so looking forward to tonight.
Many Americans might not realize that London is 51.5 degrees north, so seeing the northern lights there isn’t as surprising as seeing them somewhere far to the south like Toronto.
It's clear in West London, but nothing visible at the moment, even on a 60 second camera exposure. Not a great surprise - we're a long way south, a lot of light polution, and the moon is still up - but worth a try.
Edit: 02:30 UTC - moon has set now, but still nothing on a long camera exposure.
You might be able see them on a clear moonless night between march and September, which mostly rules out Seattle (we have too much light pollution anyways).
For the duration of this window, https://www.reddit.com/r/Edinburgh/new/ has some. They're 4-8h old at the time I post, but would still be found in sort new if you walk back to the window of time.
I believe many of them to be "visible to my camera, not visible to me" class images.
I saw the aurora once in Edinburgh 4-5 decades ago and it was decidedly Meh (for much this reason) -And again 3 decades ago I saw Aurora Australis in Tasmania and it was much less "meh" for the reasons of dark sky and 13 degrees more polar lattitude than Edinburgh (42 vs 55)
Just like a solar eclipse, the aurora is one of those celestial phenomena that you really have to experience firsthand, at least once in your life. It's worth the hassle!