1:42 PM
| Sunrise at | 9:59 AM | in direction | 137° | Southeast |  |
| Sunset at | 4:08 PM | in direction | 223° | Southwest |  |
Aurora are a fact of life here and a celestial event that makes the hours of dark something to anticipate happily. Anchorage Daily News covered the event: Aurora viewing is dazzling in Alaska following solar storm. They also provided a really nice slide show of the northern skies: Slide show of Aurora.
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| Ronn Murray: ronnmurrayphoto.com |
Aurora are most often various shades of green, but I have seen the aqua white color as well and occasionally violet. Last year, we noticed the lights were on from our loft area and drove to a location where we were not enclosed by trees. The lights filled up the entire sky, first growing in one section of the night arena, then climaxing to fade while another area took up the show. The photos capture the brilliance and range of the colors, but don't capture their life.
They are our celestial dragons, long tails and spike manes always moving in their survey of the world below. They move in and out of view as their flights across the night sky take them closer or farther from earth. They are utterly beautiful and captivating.
For those of you who prefer to think of aurora as the result of solar storms instead of dragons, here is the the scientific description and predictions for the next 4 years or so:
Touch down is expected around tomorrow 5am AKST, 23 January, although time uncertainty is pretty high (+/- 7 hours). The current forecast of the coming storm intensity is G2 class (moderate, 600 occurrences per solar cycle of 11 years ), while development to G3 (strong, 300 occurrences) is possible. Meanwhile, Solar Radiation Storm of S3 class is ongoing, it is the strongest storm since May 2005. No worries for "surface" dwellers - it does not penetrate below about 100 km mostly, although somewhat elevated comparing to the normal condition radiation dose is possible for trans-polar flights passengers and crews.
It is period of growing solar activity now and events like this will occur more-or-less frequently during coming 3-4 years. If you are interested in in-advance notifications for possible aurora, you might want to subscribe to the "space weather" mail list at SpaceWeather.com <http://paceWeather.com> Web-site (http://spaceweather.com/
More detailes on the SWx scales and effects can be found here -
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
Current aurora map for NH is here http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/
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