The Northern Lights Were Visible All Across The United States Last Night And Could Be Back Tonight As Well
AP — An unusually strong solar storm hitting Earth produced stunning displays of color in the skies across the Northern Hemisphere early Saturday, with no immediate reports of disruptions to power and communications.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning when a solar outburst reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours sooner than anticipated. The effects of the Northern Lights, which were prominently on display in Britain, were due to last through the weekend and possibly into next week.
The storm could produce northern lights as far south in the U.S. as Alabama and Northern California, NOAA said. But it was hard to predict and experts stressed it would not be the dramatic curtains of color normally associated with the northern lights, but more like splashes of greenish hues.
“That’s really the gift from space weather: the aurora,” Steenburgh said. He and his colleagues said the best aurora views may come from phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye.
I tried my best to choose photos that reflected what the northern lights actually looked like across the United States last night. For whatever reason, there's still a small part of me that feels like the internet is just trolling me with these. My Twitter feed is so full of troll accounts, and accounts where every single post is ironic or sarcastic that my first reaction when I see a cool picture is to assume I'm being trolled. Tweets of this nature (Shoutout fellow John Rich @JohnWRichKid).
On top of that, there's all these photographers out there snapping pics with their state of the art cameras with souped up lenses time-lapsed over a certain amount of time which make the northern lights look like a legitimate alien invasion. The pictures are cool and all. It's not like they're fake photographs. But I still feel like I'm being lied too when someone posts one of these pictures and says, "Wow look how incredible the northern lights were in Ohio last night!"
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For example:
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I know your photos aren't edited Michael. I'm sure you're a wonderful photographer. But you can't deny that's a deceptive tweet. The northern lights were incredible, but in reality they looked much more like the following photo. Which is still awesome. At least awesome enough to cause a bit of tension in my home this morning.
Tough break for my fiancée (who I've recently come to learn takes weather events very seriously) to miss out on the northern lights in Ohio. Right on the heels of missing out on a total eclipse in Ohio just one month ago.
Sorry babes. That's the price you pay to be in a city where you can pay double the rent for half the space and share a train car with a homeless man shooting up heroin. You gotta take the good with the bad. To be honest, I don't know why she's complaining. We have a perfectly good galaxy light in our bedroom capable of producing just as many, if not more colors, than stupid nature ever could.
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I suppose it still would have been pretty stunning to catch the northern lights in the continental US last night. It's something I didn't even think was possible. Apparently the northern lights/aurora borealis actually did appear briefly in Ohio in 2001, and over Lake Erie in 2011, but it don't think it was anything like this. Good shit nature. Turns out solar storms are pretty neat. As long as they don't end up shutting down communications across the country, or covering the earth in radiation like we were originally told. If all that comes from these storms are green and purple skies, give me as many solar storms as possible.
If you're in a location where you could have seen the lights last night, but unfortunately missed out, there's a chance they might be back tonight. Good luck catching them. This could be the best chance you ever get.
USA Today - And good news for anyone who missed it: You may get another chance Saturday night.
"Overnight, aurora were visible across much of the United States. Weather permitting, they may be visible again tonight," the Space Weather Prediction Center said in a Saturday morning update.