Brian has been kept busy taking aurora photos during the last week. Right after our amazing light show on Friday the 13th, we had 4 days of blizzard conditions with ridiculous winds. On March 17th, the aurora returned. At suppertime, it had looked pretty dismal for seeing any aurora, but the skies overhead cleared. The winds were still so severe that we dared not go more than a few feet outside the door.
As it turned out, we had a St Patrick's Day with plenty of green in the sky. Even better, there were pinks and purples too! What started out as a mild storm intensified to be the strongest storm of this solar cycle with a Kp factor of 8. That number tells how far south the storm will extend toward the equator. In Sturbridge, I believe we need a Kp of 6-7, but in Churchill you can often see an aurora with a Kp of 1. On this evening, it seemed we were actually getting less aurora than was expected, but our camera told a different story. Never had we seen this much pink/purple in our aurora photos!
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| This photo has it all- aurora, rocket launcher, and birdfish CNSC logo! |
According to Spaceweather.com, our wonderful skies on March 17th were the result of two solar events happening on March 15th. First a magnetic filament erupted, followed by a solar flare. A magnetic filament is an arc of gas on the surface of the sun that can last for months. It usually erupts and spews enormous amounts of solar matter into space. That is what happened this time.
On all of the following nights we were fortunate to have skies that cleared after dark, and also fortunate to have more auroras delivered to us by the solar wind. This was all from the aftermath of the St Patrick's Day excitement.
On March 22nd, a high speed solar wind stream brought us a spectacular evening of aurora viewing! In the afternoon, Andrew (one of our volunteers) built an igloo with some of our guests. After sunset, the Arctic Skies group had gone outside to view the crescent Moon and Venus setting over the igloo.
It was quite a site to see the Moon and Venus over the igloo, but suddenly an aurora appeared all around the sky. The next several hours were filled with majestic curtains of light. Just before I turned in, there were curtains of light in in every direction. From the corona (looking straight up into the curtain), there was a starburst of dancing light rays. One of the people outside with me commented that it felt like we were underneath a skirt of light.
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| Brian took this photo at 5 AM, and you can see a promise of dawn on the horizon. |
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