Aurora comes in view
I’ve lived in Washington over five years now — it’s the most northern state I’ve ever lived in — and I am insanely jealous of anyone who’s seen an aurora borealis display, and more specifically, of people who have seen one over this town. It’s happened before; at least as recently as last year (when I was out of town), and according to SpaceWatch, as recently as THIS WEEK (thank you, sunspot 798).
Clueless newbie that I am, my first reaction was to poke my head out the window and look up, down, all around. Did the sky seem a little pinker out there? I have absolutely no idea. There! Was that red?
Some clues to help me out for the next time, which might be as early as Tuesday night…:
- I should be seeing a pretty good display around midnight. Since it’s now 1AM, there’s no point to me looking.
- For a good time, probably finding someplace really dark, and then looking northeast would be the best idea.
- Aurora chasers wants to be my early warning system, as long as I can figure out which number to use as my predicted Kp Index
Thanks for this great post, Skye.
I found this link for determining the kP index:
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/Aurora/
It looks like Seattle’s is 7.
I’ve lived here 30+ years, and the only Aurora Borealis I’ve seen is from an airplane somewhere over Montana. thanks for the link.
I use 6 for Kp with the aurora chasers alert and get lots of false positives, so 7 sounds like a good bet unless you have a high tolerance for getting IMs at all hours of the day and night. I’ve gotten 16 emails since Sunday, and I think three of them were during darkness (also during cloudiness, alas.)
It did pay off on November 8th of last year when I was able to see an aurora from my light-polluted back yard in Issaquah.
I’ve been using some of the software from http://www.spacew.com. It gets truly geeky, but I am down with that. I haven’t been able to see aurora in Seattle – it’s always cloudy when I have the chance to look. But I’ve seen plenty in Eastern Washington before. Good luck!
They are significantly easier to see if you head up only a little further north, like to Whistler.
I was in Alaska at the start of the month for a week’s vacation. We headed up to Denali National Park and at about midnight on a tip from a park ranger stepped out of our hotel room and watched 20 minutes of green and red dancing lights across the sky. It was magic!
i have seen the Aurora Whorealis. This can be viewed nightly from 10PM – 2AM from about 85th and Aurora all the way until 150th and Aurora.
It is not a pretty site, however.
thanks for the useful info and encouragement guys! I did have my (predicted)kP set to 6 but I think I’m going to up it to 7 based on all this advice.