Sunday Night’s Northern Lights — What To Know

by · Forbes
The Northern Lights are seen above the Columbia River Gorge from Chanticleer Point Lookout in the ... [+] early morning hours of May 11, 2024 in Latourell, Oregon. Places as far south as Alabama and parts of Northern California were expected to see the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights from a powerful geomagnetic storm that reached Earth. (Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images)Getty Images

It’s likely that Sunday night could see a rare display of the Northern Lights — also known as the aurora borealis — at mid-latitudes.

The warning from SpaceWeather.com comes in the wake of two massive X-rated solar flares — an X7.1 and an X9.1 — on Thursday, Oct. 3, that led to what astronomers call coronal mass ejections.

Solare flares are powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiation that travel at light speed and take only eight minutes to reach Earth, often disrupting some radio communications and satellites. Both X-flares came from active sunspot AR3842.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare — seen as the bright flash in ... [+] the center – on Oct. 3, 2024. The image shows subsets of extreme ultraviolet light that highlight the extremely hot material in flares and which are colorized in red and gold.NASA/SDO

CMEs are much slower-moving clouds of charged particles, which take a few days to reach Earth — and cause the Northern Lights.

Crucially, both of the CMEs are traveling in the direction of Earth, but at different speeds. When they arrive, geomagnetic storms are predicted to ignite, the first on Friday, Oct. 4 and the second — and probably the most powerful — on Sunday, Oct. 6.

Whether Sunday's display will rival May 10’s extreme G5 geomagnetic storm — the most severe in the past two decades — is unknown, with space weather forecasting still in its infancy.

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Prepare For Big Northern Lights Display This Weekend After Massive Solar Flare

What NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center is forecasting is a G3 (Strong) geomagnetic storm on Friday and Sunday. That means aurora as far south as Illinois and Oregon, but don't be surprised if what materializes is a G4 (Intense) geomagnetic storm. The latter could mean aurora as being seen as far south as Alabama and northern California. The greatest expected Kp index for the aurora borealis for Oct. 4-6 is 7.

Before heading out to search for aurora, check for:

Note that you'll need to observe with the naked eye from a site with low light pollution if you're to see anything impressive, such as an International Dark Sky Place (U.S./worldwide) or a Dark-Sky Preserve (Canada).

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.