If you've never seen the northern lights, it's really worth finding any excuse to go do. Videos can give you an idea of what it's like, but there's something deep in the animal brain that reacts to the sky being full of shimmering, spooky light, that is really impossible to describe or to capture on film.
Just like a solar eclipse, the aurora is one of those celestial phenomena that you really have to experience firsthand, at least once in your life. It's worth the hassle!
I'm living in aurora country, and not really seeing what's the big deal with some green streaks in the sky.
On the other hand I've heard the point made that if a clear night sky was as rare as northern lights or an eclipse, people would similarly be freaking out about it as a life-changing almost religious primal experience.
It's very easy to take this stuff for granted, I guess is what I'm saying.
Just be aware that the saturated colors seen on photographs are an artifact of the medium and the vidoes making it look like fireworks are typically sped-up.
It can’t really be captured om film - and what you see on film is quite different.
It's too bad they aren't easier to plan around. I looked into going to Iceland once and it was like " there might be an aurora." As I recall, it's less of a seasonal thing and more sheer luck. (I know the weather is hard to predict in general.)
Here's the best aurora forecast tool : https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast from NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
Looks like cloud free parts of Canada are in for a show (minus the most populated part).
[edited, thank you, anthomtb]
I like taking photos of the aurora, and I often use NOAA's forecasts to plan sightings.
I wanted the forecast in a simple non-video format, and was tired of doing the mental math converting from UTC, so I made my own tool to show Kp forecast values (from NOAA) in the user's local timezone. Here it is in case it can be useful to anyone else:
Obviously, it's pretty bare bones. You need to have an understanding of which Kp value is needed to see the lights at your latitude. I'm working on adding more features to make it more user friendly
> Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone.
That's totally untrue. You can buy a USB floppy drive on Amazon for $20, and a pack of disks for another $20. I have two 1990s-era Power Macintosh machines with floppy drives sitting on my desk right now, they both work, as do the floppy drives.
And I was able to access some ~15-year-old floppies just a couple of years ago with no trouble.
Optical media not an option? I mean... those are basically microscopic punch cards aren't they? I've seen some 100GB writable blue rays being sold at reasonable prices.
> Estimates of the storm strength (Dst) range from −0.80 to −1.75 µT.
So.. less than Earth's ambient magnetic field?
While low power, long distance lines (like telegraph or POTS) would be in trouble, and maaaybe some network cards would burn our due to long Ethernet wires, storage devices and many computers would be fine. If you are super worried, seal some hard drives in food tins - the frequency is pretty low so it doesn't even have to be fully airtight.
After some searching I found this PDF presentation: "Geomagnetic Storms
and the US Power Grid" https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/fin... , which says: "GIC are Quasi DC currents" and "Moderate Storm - Electric Field at Earth’s Surface 1-5 V/km / Largest recorded 20 V/km" and
Let's assume 10x worse than largest recorded, 200 V / km.. not sure if this is physically possible but probably a worst case.
A high-voltage transmission lines would be in danger, as presentation said. Not only because of overvoltage, but also because this is injecting DC into lines designed for AC only.
A 10 km old-style telephone or telegraph line would get 2000 volt on it... this would definitely burn the equipment or set it on fire.
What about my house? The AC comes in from nearest distribution transformer ("pole pig"). The nominal output is 110V RMS (155V peak), and let's say there is ~0.6 miles (1 km) from it to my house. This will be 355V peak arriving, equivalent to 251V RMS. My appliances and lights (which were turned on) are likely gone... but many computers might survive, as modern power supplies are often rated "90-240V" for european usage (and they don't care about AC/DC mix either). And of course if you had any surge protectors in your extension cords, they'd protect your devices -- they were designed exactly for situations like those.
What about my local network? There are less then 100 meters of distance, so 20V induced voltage.. and common Ethernet is rated for 2000V, so this is going to be fine.
What about USB cords, low-voltage power cords, etc...? Well, those are shielded / have two wires right next to each other, so they would normally be unaffected. But let's say you had a bad ground connector or incompletely plugged in device, so you have a loop. In this case, 2 meter (6ft) cable would have 0.4 volts. That's within tolerances of most ICs, they'd be fine.
What about unplugged device? Your 18" laptop will develop 0.08 volts in the worst case. Most of the modern ICs run in 0-1V range, so they won't burn up (but might have some glitches if device is working). Your antennas (WIFI and 3G) would also develop extremely low voltage so they would be fine as well.
TL/DR: country-wide systems (power grid, old telegraph) is in trouble. City-wide might or might not survive. Anything smaller than a house is fine. If you are worried about second Carrington, get water, food and generator, and get some surge protectors.
I saw the Aurora in Oslo, Norway about a month ago. It's the first time in my life I saw it that far south. I grew up in Tromsø, where it was pretty common, but man... You never get "used" to really good Aurora. It's always amazing.
There has long been a live page from lancs.ac.uk [0] - it's currently showing the very high values from last night.
Slightly strangely - and a slight chance of being related - we've had multiple power cuts here (Sussex) throughout the night and since the last one the mains voltage is way down (182v vs the normal 230-ish according to the UPS).
I love hacker news. We geek out on aurora borealis. What I am more grateful of is that the community is so diverse ; Norway, Poland, England, Estonia, Netherlands and the list goes on.
I was reading through the comments waiting for this. It's just one of the local news sites / papers for the area, it's quite terrible in many ways really. I was very surprised to see it on HN this morning.
Try installing a pi-hole in your home network. I set one up more for curiosity than anything else, but an unexpected side effect was that these local news websites, which were previously completely unusable on mobile, suddenly became just about tolerable again.
I'm on the internet all the time and I've never---not once---seen one of these articles before the event actually happens. It's quite frustrating. It was a clear night last night. Overcast tonight.
TV has ruined the aurora. Seen them 3 times in Scandinavia and it's never been as vivid as on TV. Sitting out in the wilderness roasting things on a fire waiting for them is a great experience though.
I've always assumed that the Northern Lights were quite a common site in Tallinn?
I just looked it up and the latitude of the place I'm from in Canada is about in the middle between Tallinn and London. We usually see the Northern Lights here several times year, With exceptionally prominent displays occurring at least at least once every 2-3 years.
I did not expect how often Americans would ask me about the Northern Lights when I visited there for a few months many years ago. They were often so fascinated and slightly envious/baffled by how blasé I felt about something so incredible because it was so common to me.
Once Kristian Birkeland proved how northern lights actually worked based on his theory about it, the relation between particles from the sun, earths magnetic field and the poles, a string of norwegian pioneers studied the phenomena for a few decades. Up until 1960 actually. Then, some researchers from scandinavia and US teamed up to establish a facility for launching research rockets into the aurora, as balloons could not get high enough and satellites wasn't a thing really. They agreed on Andøya in northern norway as the perfect spot for such a rocket range. It was also directly under the northern lights oval too. Then in 18th august 1962, they launched the first rocket and has done so ever since. There are still lots to learn from the sun by studying the northern lights in the polar regions. A really exciting story actually.
I was flying over from Dublin to Birmingham on Sunday evening around just after 10pm but I didn't see much out the window, would've been pretty cool if I had though.
Darn it as I been chasing them recently in Iceland and this past Tuesday I got a flight to Fairbanks, AK(im in Baltimore). That flight got canceled but I could have rescheduled it. Though I caught Covid two days after.
My Aurora app says the lights should be visible in Fairbanks next Sunday and Monday, of course cloud cover kills your chances of seeing it but as of now looks partly sunny those days.
[+] [-] idlewords|3 years ago|reply
Just like a solar eclipse, the aurora is one of those celestial phenomena that you really have to experience firsthand, at least once in your life. It's worth the hassle!
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
On the other hand I've heard the point made that if a clear night sky was as rare as northern lights or an eclipse, people would similarly be freaking out about it as a life-changing almost religious primal experience.
It's very easy to take this stuff for granted, I guess is what I'm saying.
[+] [-] bazoom42|3 years ago|reply
It can’t really be captured om film - and what you see on film is quite different.
[+] [-] bsimpson|3 years ago|reply
It's too bad they aren't easier to plan around. I looked into going to Iceland once and it was like " there might be an aurora." As I recall, it's less of a seasonal thing and more sheer luck. (I know the weather is hard to predict in general.)
[+] [-] rtkwe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeduck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blamazon|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/JJl-mlUYNZE?t=2m7s
[+] [-] vmilner|3 years ago|reply
“With my reputation?”
[+] [-] stuartq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway12245|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekerta|3 years ago|reply
I wanted the forecast in a simple non-video format, and was tired of doing the mental math converting from UTC, so I made my own tool to show Kp forecast values (from NOAA) in the user's local timezone. Here it is in case it can be useful to anyone else:
https://auroraoutlook.com
Obviously, it's pretty bare bones. You need to have an understanding of which Kp value is needed to see the lights at your latitude. I'm working on adding more features to make it more user friendly
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] techsolomon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
https://longnow.org/ideas/very-long-term-backup/
There was a near miss in 2012. These things are not than uncommon, on a century-scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
We had a miss in 2012:
https://youtu.be/sg3NAdOYp8Q
[+] [-] blibble|3 years ago|reply
finally my backup strategy of tens of thousands of pages of dot matrix printing on continuous feed paper has been validated
[+] [-] ivraatiems|3 years ago|reply
> Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone.
That's totally untrue. You can buy a USB floppy drive on Amazon for $20, and a pack of disks for another $20. I have two 1990s-era Power Macintosh machines with floppy drives sitting on my desk right now, they both work, as do the floppy drives.
And I was able to access some ~15-year-old floppies just a couple of years ago with no trouble.
[+] [-] irusensei|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|3 years ago|reply
So.. less than Earth's ambient magnetic field?
While low power, long distance lines (like telegraph or POTS) would be in trouble, and maaaybe some network cards would burn our due to long Ethernet wires, storage devices and many computers would be fine. If you are super worried, seal some hard drives in food tins - the frequency is pretty low so it doesn't even have to be fully airtight.
[+] [-] Uehreka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|3 years ago|reply
Apparently the electrical fires were from GIE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_curren... ), which are "measured in V/km".. but how big were they?
After some searching I found this PDF presentation: "Geomagnetic Storms and the US Power Grid" https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/fin... , which says: "GIC are Quasi DC currents" and "Moderate Storm - Electric Field at Earth’s Surface 1-5 V/km / Largest recorded 20 V/km" and
Let's assume 10x worse than largest recorded, 200 V / km.. not sure if this is physically possible but probably a worst case.
A high-voltage transmission lines would be in danger, as presentation said. Not only because of overvoltage, but also because this is injecting DC into lines designed for AC only.
A 10 km old-style telephone or telegraph line would get 2000 volt on it... this would definitely burn the equipment or set it on fire.
What about my house? The AC comes in from nearest distribution transformer ("pole pig"). The nominal output is 110V RMS (155V peak), and let's say there is ~0.6 miles (1 km) from it to my house. This will be 355V peak arriving, equivalent to 251V RMS. My appliances and lights (which were turned on) are likely gone... but many computers might survive, as modern power supplies are often rated "90-240V" for european usage (and they don't care about AC/DC mix either). And of course if you had any surge protectors in your extension cords, they'd protect your devices -- they were designed exactly for situations like those.
What about my local network? There are less then 100 meters of distance, so 20V induced voltage.. and common Ethernet is rated for 2000V, so this is going to be fine.
What about USB cords, low-voltage power cords, etc...? Well, those are shielded / have two wires right next to each other, so they would normally be unaffected. But let's say you had a bad ground connector or incompletely plugged in device, so you have a loop. In this case, 2 meter (6ft) cable would have 0.4 volts. That's within tolerances of most ICs, they'd be fine.
What about unplugged device? Your 18" laptop will develop 0.08 volts in the worst case. Most of the modern ICs run in 0-1V range, so they won't burn up (but might have some glitches if device is working). Your antennas (WIFI and 3G) would also develop extremely low voltage so they would be fine as well.
TL/DR: country-wide systems (power grid, old telegraph) is in trouble. City-wide might or might not survive. Anything smaller than a house is fine. If you are worried about second Carrington, get water, food and generator, and get some surge protectors.
[+] [-] kebman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zh3|3 years ago|reply
Slightly strangely - and a slight chance of being related - we've had multiple power cuts here (Sussex) throughout the night and since the last one the mains voltage is way down (182v vs the normal 230-ish according to the UPS).
[0]https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/
[+] [-] pettycashstash2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zlib|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluehatbrit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neil44|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnfargbl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weberer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jinnko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnsaff2|3 years ago|reply
We just went to see them at our nearest beach in Tallinn.
[+] [-] Teever|3 years ago|reply
I just looked it up and the latitude of the place I'm from in Canada is about in the middle between Tallinn and London. We usually see the Northern Lights here several times year, With exceptionally prominent displays occurring at least at least once every 2-3 years.
I did not expect how often Americans would ask me about the Northern Lights when I visited there for a few months many years ago. They were often so fascinated and slightly envious/baffled by how blasé I felt about something so incredible because it was so common to me.
[+] [-] hoyd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robtaylor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cph123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abruzzi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
The Sun has been weirdly energetic for about 150 years or so, with far more thermal and electromagnetic output than history would suggest.
[+] [-] paul7986|3 years ago|reply
My Aurora app says the lights should be visible in Fairbanks next Sunday and Monday, of course cloud cover kills your chances of seeing it but as of now looks partly sunny those days.
[+] [-] pallas_athena|3 years ago|reply
https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2023/02/brandenburg-po...
[+] [-] neverrroot|3 years ago|reply
Happy hunting!
[+] [-] Taniwha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staringback|3 years ago|reply