Northern Lights in Maine tonight!

I subscribe to Southworth Planetarium's Daily Astronomer email newsletter and yesterday I received exciting news about a "solar tsunami" that is passing over Maine right now. The Press Herald ran a story this morning about this event and the possibility that tonight might make for great sky viewing.

I thought I'd share yesterday's Daily Astronomer from USM as well as an excerpt from the news story today just to give you an idea of what to expect from the night sky tonight.

It sounds like a great reason to let the kids stay up late tonight!

Excerpt from Press Herald story today
Traveling at 2.7 million miles an hour, a "solar tsunami" enveloped the planet on Tuesday.

As a result, scientists said, residents of northern regions around the globe were getting a chance to see the northern lights Tuesday night and tonight.

But as the night progressed in Maine on Tuesday, it became increasingly clear that stargazers were going to be disappointed. The National Weather Service in Gray said clouds covered most of Maine, making our chance of seeing the northern lights very slim.

Forecasters and scientists said tonight into Thursday morning may offer better viewing of the light show in the sky.

Doug Biesecker, a physicist at the center, said Tuesday's blast of charged particles from the sun primed the skies for a second storm, expected to arrive tonight into Thursday morning.

"We think the chances of viewing this event will go up later in the week when the second storm hits," Biesecker said. "It could be a lot stronger."

He estimated that the storms, which are 40 million miles wide, carried 10 million tons of charged solar particles. Humans are shielded from them by Earth's magnetic field.

The storms can disrupt satellite communications, he said, though the center doesn't expect them to do it this time.

Read rest of story here...

DAILY ASTRONOMER EMAIL NEWSLETTER from yesterday
They are calling it a "solar tsunami," a beautifully poetic, but scarcely accurate description for an eruption along the sun's visible "surface."*

This was the event observed on Sunday, when the Sun expelled a charged particle cloud (another terrible description). This eruption occurred on the Earth-facing part of the Sun, so most of these projected particles were fired directly at our planet. As the Sun is more than 93 million miles away presently, this particle cloud required more than forty-eight hours to reach us. That is an advantage of solar events: we can observe them at one moment and still have more than two days to prepare for any ramifications.

What will the ramifications be of this latest eruption?
Alas, that is a hard question to answer. When one is dealing with such space-weather phenomena, one must speak in terms of probabilities. It is possible that the sudden influx of solar material, diffuse though it will be by the time it arrives, could disrupt our highly satellite-reliant communication systems. Such violent solar out-gassings have had similar catastrophic effects on us before, such as the Quebec electrical grid collapse in the late 80s. Yet, we have no idea what will happen this time. We shall just have to cling desperately to our blackberries (which will do nothing to protect them, of course) and await the consequences, if there are any.

We might also experience a beautiful aurora event this evening.
Here we must impress on our readers that auroral events are as frustrating as that square block-round hole test that they gave some of us in high school. Unlike lunar phases and planet positions, aurora events often defy our predictive powers. Aurorae occur when the solar particles excite the upper atmosphere and cause it to glow. Essentially, the charged particle might impart energy into a nitrogen atom. Energy has to do something, so it will push an electron into a higher energy orbit. When the electron settles back down to its original lower energy state, it will release a photon with an energy equal to the energy level difference separating the two energy orbits. Imagine this happening to billions of atoms in the upper atmosphere so that you have a flood of photons. It is these visible light photons that we perceive as the aurora.

The Aurora might be a faint white or could consist of vibrant colors, depending on how much energy is expended during the event. It is indescribable and therefore, we won't bother to describe it.

We will tell you to watch the northern sky tonight.

Generally, the best time to watch for an aurora is between 10 p.m, - 2 a.m, even though an aurora could appear anytime. If possible, be as far away from light sources as possible. Aurora are diffuse events and therefore can be easily obscured even by porch lights.

If you miss it tonight, you might have another chance tomorrow night.

Trust us, it's worth it.

* At the insistence of the planetarium's legal staff, we remind subscribers that the Sun does not have an actual surface, as defined in terrestrial terms. Like all stars, the Sun is a sphere of hot gases (or plasma).