This also appears to be happening in the southern hemisphere as well and growing brighter. My layman understanding is auroras are the result of coronal mass ejections interacting with Earth's atmosphere, but I don't recall these incidents being large enough to be so visible in the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.
This is the biggest storm since 2003! We hit a G5 on the SWPC geomagnetic storm reading, and my team had to power down components on our satellites to keep them safe!
Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
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Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share a photo?
Currently pretty good at the South Pole. The pink skies are wild. Green auroras are fairlty common over the winter, but it's unusual for it to be this red. If you're interested in a real time video, here's one I captured a few weeks ago from our "back yard" (excuse the Instagram link) https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6T27pEO7dQ/?igsh=eXJyOGtuY2l...
Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#253This is related to the cycles of Earth’s core Our planet’s magnetic field is “entangled” with the Sun’s activity This unusual flare means unusual activity for our magnetic field, hence for the core as well It would be cool to have some realtime comparison/visualization of Earths magnetic core activity, vs solar flares
Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
car headlights are brighter than the sun from a short enough distance; perhaps you think we can guess what distance you're talking about seeing the car headline from, but actually you have to be explicit about it
In the dark notice how much light comes from a phone and how much that illuminates the person holding the phone. A car headlight shining your way from hundreds of meters even over 1km will often illuminate that person far more than their phone screen. So if the phone screen is enough to undo the hour long eyes adjusting to the dark duration, then the car headlights at almost any realistic distance causes an undo.
a 500 nit phone screen emitting over about a steradian from an 80mm × 160mm area is 6.4 lumens, but at night you usually turn it down to minimum brightness, say 0.6 lumens. (i haven't measured.) at a distance of 300mm that steradian is 0.09m², so it's about 6 lux
so the cellphone is about 200 times brighter than the headlight at that distance, and that's also observable from looking at people using cellphones walking on the highway
but the person i was asking for more detail didn't specify that the headlight is pointed at your face; and in most situations where you can see headlights, they're not pointed at you. that's just a detail you filled in
Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#255Can't believe I slept through this.
Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#256Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t look like that in reality. If I take a photo on my phone here in the UK midlands I get pink and green in all directions with a 3 second exposure. However with just the naked eye it’s like super high level clouds
Ok why is it that some people say northern lights look EXACTLY like these spectacular photos, and others say in real life they are actually barely visible and you need a camera and very dark skies? Is there some kind of running joke I’m missing? I saw some northern lights in Iceland but they were very dim and underwhelming, I didn’t even know what I was looking at until I photographed them and saw the vivid green str…
Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#258Re: Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
#259I feel I need to report my experience from Denmark, Jutland. It started with white broad streaks, which most of all looked like fog, but then perhaps after 10 minutes or so, we saw colors of red, purple and green begin to emerge from the these streaks. Most astoundingly it all seemed to emanate from a fluctuating point in the middle of the sky. If you looked closely at this point you could see it fall into itself, mo…
Thank you for sharing that. I wonder at what speed the morphing happen, also a sense of proportion. Very hard to capture that in anything but direct experience.
The scale of change I saw yesterday is that it fades in or changes over five seconds maybe, it's not changing faster than that. The most intense lights were over some 20 minute period maybe and then slowly it was mostly disappearing again.