Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
foto-webcam.eu
foto-webcam.eu
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, morphing and shifting continuously.
We went around the house and we could purple streaks at the top and orange to red patches at the bottom of the sky.
Colors observed: Whitish blue, Green, Purple, Red, and Orange
An absolutely a beautiful experience.
It doesn't do what we saw justice at all.
Here's a color enhanced version of grafelic's photo that shows the color bands more easily,
https://i.imgur.com/IS8JWD8.jpeg
Added some blur after color adjustments to remove pixelation artifacts.
Near, but definitely not retrospective
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...
Sadly we have pretty high winds at the moment and visibility is poor due to all the blowing snow, but if you're high up (eg an observation deck), it's a bit clearer.
https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/wildhaus/2024/05/10/2220
and this continues through the entire night https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/wildhaus/2024/05/10/2230
till shortly before sunset, where the exposure time probably shortens too much to capture the color of the the aurora https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/wildhaus/2024/05/11/0420
Other locations:
https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/ewa/2024/05/11/0330
https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/glecksteinhuette/2024/05/1...
https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/hochleckenhaus/2024/05/11/...
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.
As the sun went down I was waking through a woodland. I thought the dark would help my eyes to see the aurora, and I could point my camera away from the light pollution of Liverpool and maybe catch some colour with a long exposure.
Suddenly, I realised the colour of the aurora was coming through the trees, and getting brighter. I wasn't expecting it to be visible to naked eye like this. In these latitudes the advice is to set your camera to highest iso and slowest shutter speed and hope to catch a little colour. I wasn't expecting this! So I packed up quick and ran through the woods and into open fields. There, directly above me was this intense white light, with white arms forming a sort-of cross. The longest arm formed an arch over the whole sky, and where they reached the earth, on either side they became colourful, like a twinkling rainbow stretching out to space.
I didn't have the equipment or the wits to get a good photo. I just threw myself on the ground and lay on my back watching.
Wildest thing I ever saw. Absolutely awesome.
When I regain my composure, I will upload some photos somewhere (where, though?) and edit this comment.
You have like 30min to edit and there's a timeout for replies too so maybe put the link in your profile if it gets later <3
Yesterday evening I tried Crosby beach. Also nothing.
Did I just go at the wrong time? It was between 11pm and 1am.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. My brother, who is a hobby astronomer, called me and sent me outside. Initially, I saw only a faint red glow in the northeast of the sky, but after a few minutes, my eyes adapted and I could see how it slowly moved and changed its form over time. I stayed outside for maybe 15 minutes and then went back inside. An hour later, I went outside again and almost the whole sky was shining in all different colors and forms, from patches to clouds to pillars that seemed to support the heavens, ever chaning. Incredible.
I've seen impressive (and colorful) aurora before, and can well imagine it might've looked splendid in (darker) places. Don't give up ... maybe more on the way.
However with just the naked eye it’s like super high level clouds
We were outside at like 2AM in the night that day trying to spot it but could see any hint of it for the life of us.
Finally we used his phone and long exposure to see what it would pick up and on the captured photo we saw shades of green like aurora borealis.
Quite fascinating, it was.
They were always strong enough to be easily seen, often quite dramatic. It really does look like that if you're far enough north.
Well, actually the proper term for where we were at is East Norway. And I guess by official standards the middle of Norway is further north than where I consider the middle of Norway to be.
To be very specific, we were in Gjøvik.
https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_sea...
What the camera caught was really impressive! Even with just a couple seconds exposure on a phone. But what the human eye saw was.... effectively a portion of the sky that was unusually bright and seemed to have some sort of movement. Like you stared at it and knew something was amiss, but nothing "impressive" to look at.
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 streaks in the photo, which definitely weren’t super visible in real life. The tour guide even said they aren’t actually like the photos at all!
Are northern lights bullshit or what? What is possible to see with just a bare naked eye?
One experience you can get in person when they're really strong is how fast they can dance around above you as well. I've found the dancing lights to the naked eye are much more astounding than in timelapses or videos, 1) because that's when they're most vibrant in person, and 2) because you can see just how fast and jittery and energetic they are, unlike in a video which is usually captured at much less than 30fps for low light and denoised and frames mashed together to create those soupy smooth videos and timelapses. Nice in their own way, but nowhere near the same experience.
And when they're very low energy they will just look like green grey clouds to the naked eye.
Source: live in the arctic
The auroras won't be super vivid near larger cities in Central Europe, with a lot of light around you. It's just not north enough and not dark enough. Up north, rural Lapland or so, it can get very vivid during a winter.
Cameras tend to add their extra though.
A surprising thing to me was how the aurora can sometimes be still and sometimes move so fast. It is a strange experience. One would expect something that covers such a large part of the visible sky-dome to move slowly, but instead it can swipe around quite quickly ("like a fox's tail").
Alas, in the northern hemisphere, we've been pretty good eradicating nighttime darkness (and a lot else besides ...).
It really does look like a river of starlight across the sky, once you are a few hundred miles away from shore.
Last night from London the most I could see with my naked eye was diffuse patches of faint pink and green - sometimes highlighted by marginally brighter white-pink streaks that cut across the patches. The camera however picked them up as dramatic bright pink/green columns of light with rarely any trace of the blackness of the sky.
When I was in Iceland a few years ago though - I distinctly remember being easily able to make out super bright and well define dancing wavy bands of bright green, pink, purple and orange (with high contrast compared to the surrounding dark sky) with my naked eye. The camera again picked up the same thing but with the blackness of the sky covered by a green /pink coloured background - something definitely brighter but less well defined that what I could see with my naked eye (and the camera images were not necessarily superior than what I could see in this case).
TL:DR; I’ve seen both versions of what you describe with my naked eye and it’s definitely not bullshit! When people say they can’t see anything like the pictures - I would have to guess that they either have never been in an area with significant activity or maybe didn’t have dark enough skies without light pollution.
You can find some online, but they range from 'just like the picture' to 'random fog', so one is left not knowing what to believe.
These two photos taken with my camera, are approximately how it looked to my eyes after they'd adjusted to the dark:
https://i.imgur.com/8OOiCgX.png https://i.imgur.com/GCpyumd.png
As a comparison, this is how my phone captured the same scene with default settings:
Few-seconds exposures on a digital camera bring the colors out that you may or may not see by eye if the aurora is weak.
Also, especially mid-latitudes, sometimes an Aurora display has moments of higher brightness with color, and then again "grey curtains".
The most impressive thing about stronger Aurora, to me, is the "fine structure", the fact you may have it well overhead (not just on the northern horizon) and the fast movements. It can look like "beads" running up and down the curtains, or "lances" being thrown from the sky, and line/streak structures are very sharply outlined, not like the soft blur in multi-second pictures. And the curtains can "wave" across the entire sky in a second then.
But I haven't seen enough Aurora to dare predict anything ... I cross my fingers.
I had a similar thought about the sun’s corona during a solar eclipse, for some reason I thought people were using special photo processes to extract something that was hard to see without equipment. Then caught an eclipse and the corona blooms like a huge flower in the sky and it’s better than almost all the photos. I’m guessing the dynamic range of the corona makes it very hard to photograph anywhere near as good as what it looks like when you’re there.
In my experience when the lights are strong (and your eyes have adjusted), they look a lot like the photos - not as saturated color-wise, but very bright.
This morning, though, my feeds are chock-a-block with dramatic, colorful, detailed photos, complete with rapturous commentary about the drama of the spectacle, posted by people in the same area who were apparently watching the same sky! Well... that's a different experience than I had. I'd been told that the colors showed up more clearly through a camera, but I hadn't realized there would be little to see without one.
I am very fortunate to have excellent visual acuity, low light sensitivity and am extremely sensitive to colour/different shades or tones. There are test you can do online for this if you have a well calibrated screen. I also used to be a photographer and worked for years in low light settings documenting events. So I have put that good fortune in the genetic lottery to good use!
So for me, I absolutely saw the full colour display very strongly. I could see variations in colour throughout the height of the column and i could easily make out the striations between the different filaments. I could also easily see the curve of the bands across the northern sky. The colours to me were as obvious as the orange of light pollution you might see from a nearby town. I could see the low level patches of cloud silhouetted against the green and the huge bands of red/pinky red towering up into space.
What I will say though is that even looking at my phone was enough to dull the experience. And minimally strong light in the eye instantly desaturated the colours of the aurora and took a minute or two to recover. So you really do need dark places, dark skies and to really let your eyes full adjust to their maximum possible sensitivity.
There is a lot of variability in people’s night vision. I viewed this past aurora with a friend, we went to a relatively dark sky location and let our eyes adjust for 30 minutes. In that setting, I could make out the green and red coloration while she mostly saw it as a while glow.
Oh, here, I figured out there's an "archive" that can be browsed through. Here's the scene at the time I posted the original comment: https://www.jungfrau.ch/webcams/top-of-europe-jungfraujoch/#...
Ah, I managed to find the direct image URL in the network requests, as well: (warning, 20428px wide) https://storage.roundshot.com/5e568a0aaea5b0.54147912/2024-0...
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
But that’s much more interesting…
It's amazing how much of our conscious experience is hallucination, and yet a lot of people are disparaging LLMs for doing just the same...
Optical illusions are evidence of the pile of hacks that our senses and our consciousness use to make sense of the world. I think it is really difficult to fully disengage from the biases this induces, and we are sadly best at perceiving such flaws in others. This might be one of the reasons why humans have to socialize with other humans to maintain mental health.
The whole idea of pirates wearing eyepatches seems simply the replication of one particularly colorful pirate archetype over centuries of literature and tales.
Stereo vision is helpful on ships (and allmost everywhere else where you need eyes), even when not boarding.
Just a thought
But I know I am worse doing climbing etc. with one eye.
It is probably something you can train and get used to, that it is not such a big deal, but I cannot imagine doing it on the same level one eyed.
After I got home, I just laid down in the grass in the back yard where it's fairly dark. After about 15 minutes, I had a pretty good view of what looked a bit like streaky clouds throughout the sky. It was still somewhat faint but the movement was fantastic to watch.
Feels like one is engulfed in the Aurora when it’s strong. First time I experienced it the arctic circle actually scared me.
Also, timelapses of long exposures can give a wrong impression of how it moves. But has for a long time been the only way to actually see a video of it.
It's often not that slow and wavy in real life. It's more like watching an orchestra play, where suddenly someone plays a flute in the corner, and then a few moments later a trombone sounds from the other side. It's dramatic and beautiful when it's really on.
But modern video cameras are now good enough to capture this in real time, so hopefully we'll see more realistic videoes.
Can’t find my DSLR unfortunately otherwise it’d be on the tripod.
Had to wake the 6 year old for him to see this, once in a life time type of thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_maximum
But it's definitely not a sure thing, and this could very well be the biggest one for decades to come.
We once rented a beautiful, slightly remote house on a beach outside Reykjavik and one night, the sky danced for us. So I don't feel hard done-by.
After 20 minutes it faded from view almost entirely and we went inside. I have no idea if it came back or what it was like beforehand, maybe we got very lucky or maybe it came and went through the night?
I noticed unusual, faint light patterns in the night sky, like long spikes coming from the North. It was not the Milky Way, we can see every clear night. Color was mostly gray slightly pink. Wondered what was that ... My first aurora !!!
I'm exceedingly jealous. I don't think I've ever lived somewhere that I could see it, no matter how clear the night. Looking at images of "north america at night" vs "europe at night" I can see why.
Try it out! Enlist some of your hiking friends. They'll tell you where to go.
(it's orange outside and it's sodium vapor related)
edit: kind of whish I was at my parent's place. It's a lot less poluted but no go here; nw europe densly populated, we also have the artificial sunrise here 24/7 by means of greenhouses.
"Und doch habe ich allein, allein auf mich gestellt, ganz Europa erobert!"
Sure you did charged particles, sure you did, but welcome to Europe's secret weapon: Light pollution!
Well technically ... sodium vapor lamps are charged particles. But yea you are correct we're screwed.
That's a Dutch thing. You can choose between being a great exporter of unripe, tasteless tomatoes, or seeing Aurora Borealis, but you can't have both..
The small ones are okay-ish (cherry tomatoes) if that makes you happier
I believe we've spent far too much time worrying about CO2 and not nearly enough worrying about the dangers from our sun.
Got any scientific sources for that claim?
> I believe we've spent far too much time worrying about CO2 and not nearly enough worrying about the dangers from our sun.
Other than hardening our power grid to the effects of solar storms, what exactly could we do WRT the sun and the magnetic field?
Also, given our serious lack of progress on climate change targets and the glacial pace (pun intended) at which it has been accepted as 1) real and 2) anthropogenic, I think saying 'too much time' is inaccurate.
“Africans don’t hate Oil and Gas companies. We love Oil and today we love gas even more because we know gas will give us a chance to industrialize. No country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see Oil and Gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. The demonization of oil and gas companies will not work.”
and this is very far from an isolated opinion in the developing world. Given the amount of Western human capital applied to reducing dependence on fossil fuel it's a somewhat sobering experience to take a look at the Mauna Loa CO2 rate of increase. Can you see any significant decrease in recent years. I can't.
2) type in "Is the earth's magnetic field weakening?"
3) read the summary and click the sources if you don't believe it.
Read this about your CO2. The CO2 in our atmosphere is already at a concentration where the narrow band of wavelengths CO2 absorbs is fully saturated. This means more CO2 isn't going to cause more warming, because there is no more light in its opaque wavelengths to absorb. Also the pattern of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere vs surface temperature does not indicated that CO2 causes warming, but that CO2 levels rise after warming has already occurred. Policy around CO2 is hindering human progress and has caused massive economic damage. The models were all wrong, and this paper explains the reason.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266649682...
Starlink
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/space/surface/level/an...
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/space/surface/level/an...
Of course, it's still a beautiful sunny warm day too where I am so it'll be 5 hours or so before it's dark enough to see it.
Also - there is green over the equator - is that intentional?
Last night (here in Quebec) the entire sky was filled with colour. It's not as intense in person, but the slow shimmer of it is otherworldly. I was up on my roof for almost an hour, watching the blobs undulate in the sky. I think it made a bigger impression on me than the recent eclipse.
Here in the UK the skies should be clear.
That is one way.
I visit that site and a similar site for CME and space weather information: https://www.spaceweatherlive.com
There is a lot to see and to follow. I just came back inside after snapping pics since just after dark here in N Texas. We had a good show that started off behind the clouds but it was bright enough to shine through the clouds. Then a few hours later after the clouds cleared it was great. My camera battery quit on me. I used three cameras tonight and only really got usable photos from my iphone, whose camera I normally hate because it always seems to process images after I take them. Part of it is probably on me since I haven't taken the time to study how to optimize settings.
Anyway. Tomorrow should be another good day for this. Keep your eyes on the sky!
The keywords to use are “space weather forecast <country>”
i was going nuts in my seat and seemed to be the only one on the plane aware of what was going on.
Seems beautiful in the French alps, wonder if it's worth trying to go there tomorrow
https://www.skaping.com/chamrousse/la-croix?archives=MTcxNTM...
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g5-conditions-observed today
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/homepage in the future
It was probably not the brightest small strands I've ever seen - if my memories of Northern Saskatchewan as a kid are still accurate - but I don't think I've seen the whole sky light up to such an extent.
here's a photo: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu...
magenta and green colours were clearly visible in person during the intense periods, although obviously not as bright or intense as long exposure photos. Solidly visible bands for at least the two hours I stayed out.
Colours, ribbons, arcs and beams all visible to the naked eye and on camera.
Normally with aurouras, you only get to see a faint greyish glow on the horizon and it only looks good on camera. Not this time.
Here in Australia I leaned pretty quickly from other local Aurora chasers not to rely on Kp, which is relevant to North America only. Instead I use the global storm strength and the Hobart magnometer readings.
Used to use a NOAA page, but they changed it a while ago and don't find it as useful anymore. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-exper...
Some weather services also have a kp index, but I often feel those can't be trusted, and don't tell the whole story. And aurora is quite hit or miss, so need more updated data.
I have an app on my phone (AuroraNotifier) that chimes when there's hope. And then I use these others to plan a bit better. But some more interactive map akin to the uit.no one but where I can place myself around would be nice.
Edit: someone posted this below, looks nice, have some other kinds of data https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en.html
Edit2: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/space/surface/level/an...
I am not sure how to do that for space weather yet.
https://www.meteograppa.it/lewebcam.php
Tried looking for some webcams in the Cortina area but they seem to have a lot of clouds. Some of which appear to have a pink hue.
I’m curious what causes it to come in better in my iPhones sensors… different wavelengths perhaps?
With the naked eye I could see moving bright "clouds", and sometimes see streaks of red inside them. After 1:30 it died out quite rapidly for me.
Do they ever cancel air travel for this level of storm?
This live map (https://g7vrd.co.uk/wspr/IO81) would usually be full of worldwide contacts being reported by WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter), but the solar flares have closed down the bands quite considerably.
The map is centred on Maidenhead grid square IO81, but you can change it to wherever you are: https://www.whatsmylocator.co.uk/
This will also cause problems with aircraft, as they use HF when they're out of sight of land.
https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/jytxIMvelaGs
You can see the lights of dugway Utah in the background
By the time you cannot use Internet, it’s too late—and it won’t be all over the news because guess how we make/broadcast/receive them. Worst case you won’t even get a radio transmission through.
The non-linear effect (20x weaker flare only 4x less effect) is accounted for by how Earth's magnetic field has weakened in the ~165 years since Carrington.
Oxygen at higher altitudes has a different emission frequency apparently (I've only ever seen the faintest green pulsing aurora IRL)
It's possible to tell what elements something is made of by determining the spectra coming off of it when it's excited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spectroscopy
Located North Eastern US, just about approaching dusk. Fingers crossed!
I had luck with iso 3200, f1.4 and 1/6s shutter handheld on a sony a7iv with a 35mm f1.4 GM.
Shoot RAW and you can tweak the image better to pull down the brightness of the sky to help the colours stand out.
Settings really depend on the effect you are trying to capture: - if you want to try and capture it like your eye sees it: high iso (as high as you can stand) and aim for between 1/500 and 1/30. - if you want to capture a more painterly look with the whole sky colored in: low iso (I’d start at 200) and long exposure >3 seconds. Probably between 3 and 30 seconds depending on the available light.
Those should get you started to experiment and find what you like. Enjoy!
Oh yea. Turn off the focus light, turn off the screen, and turn off the red blinking indicators. Turn all the lights off so you can preserve your night vision.
Edit: I found online that the last one visible from Italy was in 2003, so not unheard of but still rare.
Some photos if anyone is interested
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GNQEcVZX0AA13FE?format=jpg&name=...
Right now it's appearing over North East US, and should become increasingly visible after sunset.
What a wonderful sight.
So that's cool!
spaceweather.com spaceweatherlive.com
other links in related posts also have additional sites to track things like this. Good luck.
To really see it you need a short timed exposure with aperture opened up on the camera - so small F-stop or high-speed film setting for low light, >800 speed.
I am right outside a huge metro area and directly in front of me there is a large warehouse facility with floodlights on all night long. In spite of this I could see the slight color change in the clouds (it was very cloudy here until nearly the end of the show) since the normal light color tends towards blues and oranges depending on how far off of north you are looking.
I saw red curtains here back in 2003 during a storm that also was visible in Mexico. I knew where I needed to be in my yard to be able to see things. That display began a little east of north and walked slowly west until it faded. With that in mind, that is how I started watching for lighting changes this time. The auroral oval moves from east to west during these events and for me here in N Texas it appears to be visible only for about 20 degrees either side of north before it fades. In general, if the oval extends to Kansas or into Oklahoma then we have a shot at seeing something down here since we can see the upper atmosphere from this distance. It's a bit like trying to photograph sprites above thunderstorms in that you need to be a long way away from the storm to be able to see the activity above it. I did take a photo behind me to the south and it shows aurora too so that is how I knew this was a powerful storm that would be visible a lot farther south than my place.
We should have more of these events over the next 2-3 years so keep your eyes open. Find Polaris at your location and monitor space weather reports to get a feel for the likelihood that you can see something there.
Good luck.
All I see is a beautiful sunny day.
Not sure what future forecasts are. I guess NOAA will probably have some prediction.
Approx time(as per the snapshots): 10.05.24 22:00-11.05.24 4:20
shows a video-style timeline of predictions for both Northern and Southern hemisphere.
I'm not sure what "percentage" corresponds to visible aurorae though, anyone know?
The shocking thing to me, though, is the number of satellites in the sky. This was a shit sky, way beyond what people would call "milky". Hardly any stars visible. But everywhere you looked there were satellites. I remember it being rare to see one only 15 years ago. Almost couldn't believe you could really see them back then. But now... Everywhere. I had no idea how congested it was getting up there. Wish I could leave Earth. But also glad we can't because we'd fuck that up too.
There are also very, very simplified CME propagation models (WSA-ENLIL, etc) that can start with some assumptions and give a reasonable idea about when the CME will arrive within ~12 hours.
But for every time the simulations succesfully predict severe geomagnetic events or the like they give false positives a couple dozen times. The simulations cannot predict the geoeffectiveness.
https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/lucknerhaus/2024/05/10/224...
Don't look.
The mosaic of pink/purple skies was rather beautiful, but I'm afraid preserving it slipped my mind.
My unindicted co-conspirator is a much bigger fan of song contests than I am, but sometimes you just have to wonder at the production values: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyUsNgu4GAI&t=550s
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
It’s known that the magnetic core is generating/sustaining the magnetic field, which means that anything that happens to the field, has some sort of counterpart in the core
So it would be cool to have that data: what happens inside Earth’s core when a big magnetic event is affecting it’s magnetic field