REGIONAL— One of the most intense solar storms in nearly twenty years generated some of the most colorful auroras in years across much of the country on Tuesday night, with some of the deepest colors found right here in the North Country.
Indeed, the aurora oval dipped so far south on Tuesday that the “northern lights” could be seen as far south as the Gulf Coast. Here in northern Minnesota, the sky show was actually in the southern sky, not the north as is typical of the displays, which occur when charged solar particles excite high altitude atoms normally clustered around the polar regions.
As the Timberjay went to press, the Space Weather Prediction Center had issued a solar storm watch for late Wednesday as an even larger and more intense coronal mass ejection was set to arrive on Earth Wednesday afternoon. A coronal mass ejection is a high-speed burst of massive clouds of sub-atomic particles from the sun’s outer atmosphere. Forecasters were expecting that the storm would impact radio signals, GPS, and other devices that rely on electrical fields. It was also expected to lead to more spectacular displays of the northern lights Wednesday night and possibly into Thursday.