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Northern Lights Will Be Visible Across Most of U.S. Thanks to a ‘Severe’ Geomagnetic Storm

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The northern lights are expected to put on a breathtaking show over parts of the U.S. Sunday night due to a powerful geomagnetic storm hitting Earth.

The storm reached “severe” strength early Sunday morning, strong enough to push the glowing aurora borealis further south than usual — possibly lighting up skies from Michigan and Washington State, down to Northern California and even Alabama, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“This is going to be a great night to view the lights where skies are clear,” Shawn Dahl, a coordinator at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, told the New York Times.

Clear skies are expected across much of the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, the Midwest, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley, making them prime viewing spots.

Star-gazers in the Big Apple, however, shouldn’t count on seeing much due to cloudy skies forcast basically all night. (Read more from “Northern Lights Will Be Visible Across Most of U.S. Thanks to a ‘Severe’ Geomagnetic Storm” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

Video: Extraordinary Aurora Over Pond in Fairbanks, Alaska

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This is one of the best videos we’ve seen of this year’s aurora.

It was taken at Olnes Pond in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, a little over twenty miles from our home.

It is a time-lapse production set to a beautiful instrumental.

Watching the nighttime sky dance as it does in this video is one of many reasons we could never leave the Last Frontier.

Credit for this extraordinary video goes to Taro Nakai, Micrometeorologist (a researcher of micrometeorology: the dynamics of the interaction between plant and atmosphere), who is a postdoctoral fellow of International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The Northern Lights improve our mental health, help us overcome stress

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A jaw-dropping moment really can make time appear to stand still – or at least slow down, new research suggests.

Regular “awesome” experiences may also improve our mental health and make us nicer people, claim psychologists.

The findings raise the prospect of “awe therapy” to overcome the stressful effects of fast-paced modern life.

Awe is the emotion felt when encountering something so vast and overwhelming it alters one’s mental perspective.

Examples might include experiencing a breathtaking view of the Grand Canyon, taking in the ethereal beauty of the Northern Lights, or becoming lost in a dazzling display of stars on a clear, dark night.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Schwebbes

Finnish researchers prove the Northern Lights really do make sounds (+ video)

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The northern lights of Earth are more than just dazzling light shows — they also generate their own strange applause too, a new study reveals.

The results vindicate folktales and reports by wilderness travelers, which have long described sounds associated with the northern lights (which are also known as the aurora borealis).

“In the past, researchers thought that the aurora borealis was too far away for people to hear the sounds it made,” Unto Laine, from Aalto University in Finland, said in a statement released today.

“This is true,” Laine added. “However, our research proves that the source of the sounds that are associated with the aurora borealis we see is likely caused by the same energetic particles from the sun that create the northern lights far away in the sky. These particles or the geomagnetic disturbance produced by them seem to create sound much closer to the ground.”

Laine and his colleagues determined the location of the clapping noise by comparing sounds captured by three microphones set up at a site with high auroral activity. Simultaneous measurements made by the Finnish Meteorological Institute showed a typical pattern of northern lights episodes at the time, researchers said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: GuideGunnar