Look up!

For the first time in a long time, what everyone around our town was talking about watching last Thursday night was not The Voice or the Golden Bachelorette or even the news. 

It was The Northern Lights, which put on quite a show visible to everyone in town except on our court, where we are seemingly hemmed in by too-tall trees or something. Peggy went out to look for the NLs and saw nothing in the sky except for a passing police helicopter (which is usually the #1 cause of excitement around here.)

Facebook and Instagram filled up with northern lights pictures, so I looked into the matter of what they are. It took a while to get a response, because the search engines were full of people trying to find a way to work a sponsorship deal, projecting advertising for car dealers, bariatric weight loss, and same-day floor covering services into the sky.

So here is what I found: It's all because of a solar storm, and believe me, you won't want to be outside when chunks of the sun come raining down. The sun is not doing that (yet) but it is releasing solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and these are showing up much farther south than usual in an effort to reach that vital mid-Atlantic market.

Look back in your diary for this past May. We had another solar storm then, but no one paid much attention to it because spring was springing and it was so nice out. That May storm was much more intense than the one last week. 

When the sun gets busy (!), that causes these auroras.  Auroras dance around the earth's poles, causing Northern Lights (aurora borealis) in this hemisphere, and southern lights (aurora australis) which shine brightly in the southern hemisphere. This is not to be confused with Aurora, Colorado, which shines brightly in the shadow of Denver.

And what's with all these vivid colors? They occur because energized particles from coronal mass ejections (expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun's corona) come to Earth’s magnetic field and want to show off a little, so they come in contact with atmospheric gases and presto! Different colored lights in the sky!