An extreme geomagnetic storm was taking place over our planet for the last 48 hours or so — and that caused a rare wave of Northern Lights displays as far south as Oklahoma, Virginia, Maryland, Alabama and California in the USA. NASA's spaceweather.com site has tons of amazing user-submitted photos, and background info on what causes Aurora Borealis to occur. BoingBoing pal Q-Burns Abstract Message watched the otherworldy light display last night for several hours, while he was some 30K feet above earth on a redeye flight from PDX > ORD.
"This image is the closest to what I was seeing in the plane," he says, "But imagine it moving like a curtain in a light wind. They MOVE … that's what you miss in the photos. Like curtains, and then colors shoot across the sky. It's like meteors, but they are color flashes instead of meteors. It helped that the sky was totally cloudless last night too." Here's another image presented as an animated gif to approximate the way they move.
How very mysterious and wonderful our world is! The lights are caused (at least in part) by charged particles interacting with earth's magnetic field. Those particles give off extra energy in the form of colorful light. That's a fancy way of saying that they are the visible remnants of secret and awesomely powerful space vibes. I wish I could have seen them here in Los Angeles, but we're too far south even for this unusually southern display. Plus our air's all shitty.
Link to photos of this week's display, Link to a Google news search that (for the time being) returns tons of local news reports of sightings throughout the USA. Link to a short MP3 report that comes from a phone alert service offered by spaceweather.com (bear in mind that the report was issued last week, hence the "next two days" reference).
BoingBoing reader Jesse Hamilton adds, "This very cool map will show you where they are visible: Link." And reader Guillaume Rischard in the UK says, "My university is running a nice, entirely free service (Link) that lets you subscribe to a mailing list to warn you when an aurora is likely to occur. I got one right before yesterday's for example — 'VERY HIGH local activity, possible start of geomagnetic storm.' Oh, and the Canadian space agency has an image service of which we are quite jealous: Link."
