Friday, October 31, 2003

Auroral Displays While the Sun Plays

Unless you've been locked up somewhere you know that there have been several "sun storms," or Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) this week. With these kinds of events, there is always a worry that these high-speed clouds of charged particles can do real damage to spacecraft, satellites and power grids on earth. So far that hasn't happened to any degree great enough to warrant news coverage. But those aren't the only effects from CMEs.

Last night, with the weather here, near Rochester, NY absolutely clear and cool, I went outside to watch for the most visible effect of solar storms. The aurora (Borealis in my case, Australis if you're from south of the Equator). I've seen the aurora on occasion; in Maine, while flying in the California Desert, in Korea. But it was never like last night.

The show was short lived, peaking at around 7:45 EST, but spectacular. Along the northern horizon was a broad band of pale greenish-white light. Above that were several large areas glowing bright red. And, the most beautiful part of the show, there were streamers of pale, ghostly white that stretched from just above the horizon and met just south of the zenith. As far "south" as I live, there were even large glowing red areas in the sky to the south. It was a luminous - and numinous - spectacle.

It's rare for us to have such a clear and relatively warm night at this time of the year. That such a night occurred just in time to see such a fine display of physics and the beauty of nature was fortuitous, indeed.

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