Northern Lights in Northern Indiana?
The northern lights or the aurora borealis is a phenomenon that is usually only seen in the very northern parts of the world. May 10-May 12, 2024 has brought a very special event to most of the upper part of the globe. Although going to Iceland to see this event with snow and fantastic scenery in the background is still a want of mine, being able to experience this in my own backyard (literally), is pretty darn cool.
The ability to see the northern lights from a much southern location is caused by massive sun activity that started taking place on Thursday May 9, 2024. According to the NOA, at least seven immense explosions of plasma interlaid with powerful magnetic field lines, called coronal mass ejections were released into space aimed at the earth.1 These ejections begin when the magnetic field structures (flux ropes) on the suns surface become tangled and then move to realign. This realignment sometimes causes a sudden release of electromagnetic energy and a release of sun’s plasma forced out into space at tremendous speeds.
The NOAA expects more activity from a region on the sun now patterned with a sunspot 16 times the diameter of Earth. This area was first observable Friday with the naked eye by looking at the sun through solar eclipse glasses (hopefully you saved your glasses from the eclipse last month!), or through a solar filter on your camera. I took the picture below Saturday morning and you can see this spot on the upper right hand side. Solar activity will continue to occur through Sunday until the sun spot cluster rotates out of view.
I sat out in my backyard last night hoping to view this between 11:30 pm- 1:45am. Surprisingly I did catch the northern lights. As my back yard is not the most scenic, I am going to drive somewhere tonight with a larger area of sky, less light pollution, and better overall background objects. It will also be further north, as if I drive about 30 minutes north, that puts me into lower Michigan where there is mostly woods and farms. My only hopes is that the clouds blow on out before then. The weather had called for sun yesterday, today and tomorrow, yet today is mostly cloudy. The weather service is stating full sun by 6pm, so I am crossing my fingers!!
It was cloudy most of the day on Saturday, which had me worried, but about 7:30-8:00 the winds blew the clouds and we we had pretty much clear skies. About 12:40 in the morning the colorful skies returned and were even more pretty than the previous night.
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