My View of Life on the Dock
Will we or won’t we? The word around campus is that we may have a chance of seeing Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights, TONIGHT!
Be on the look out. It is a sight not to be missed. Fingers crossed.
And…by the way….what was up with tonight’s sunset.
Unreal….sadly, this photo doesn’t even come close to doing it justice!
The sun has been carrying a blotch of sunspots for the past week and she finally tossed her cookies. A Coronal Mass Ejection shot out on January 7 and it will slam into the earth tomorrow, 4 AM Cape Ann time.
Who cares? Well, you likely will not notice it unless you pull on the woolens and get out there between 4 and 5 AM in the morning tomorrow and look north from as dark a place as possible. It is possible that as the CME slams into the Van Allen Belt we will get some northern lights all the way down to our latitude. (Lat43, like the bar.)
[edit 01/09/2014] Aurora show was a dud last night. The Kp value never rose above 3. At Lat 43 We need a Kp of at least 7 to get a decent aurora. If you saw something last night I’ll have what you’re smoking.
BREAKING NEWS: Sun Puke was slow in getting here!
Today (Thursday), additional material associated with that explosion on the sun is expected to hit Earth. Its arrival is actually a little bit later than what was anticipated. A strong geomagnetic storm is now expected to continue tonight into Friday morning. This will give us another and perhaps better opportunity to see the Northern Lights.
Cape Ann Alert!!! Let me explain what the following GIF image means. The sun has shot out an X Class Flare rocking the geomagnetic field up to “Storm” level. This is sort of like the band Spinal Tap turning their amps up to Eleven!
The left hand gif shows the central sun puking out a giant burst of color heading towards that little yellow dot. That’s earth.
Tonight, get to a northern exposure and check out the Northern Lights. Halibut Point, hike out there. Or for the lazy just park in the Lobster Pool parking lot and look to the north. One can never predict how these flares will actually impact earth but tonight and maybe even Thursday night might be a good show.
You can always enjoy the full moon if there is nothing going on and the bummer is that the full moon will dampen the view of the Northern Lights. But if you do see them imagine these charged particles slamming into us at 4 million miles per hour.
Good Morning Gloucester 