How Canadians can watch the northern lights again on Friday

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If you woke up scrolling through a seemingly neverending stream of photos of the northern lights and cursed yourself for tucking into bed promptly after Jeopardy!, take heart; you may not have missed the solar event.

The spectacular aurora borealis, precipitated by the latest geomagnetic storm, continues Friday night for much of the planet’s northern hemisphere. And if Thursday’s far-reaching display is the bar, stargazers under clear skies will be gifted another other-worldly performance.

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“There was another solar burp today, so to speak, so there should be some activity again tonight,” Royal Military College of Canada Dean of Graduate Studies and a doctor of theoretical physics and applied mathematics Jean-Marc Noël told The National Post.

Maxing out

The “burp” Noël referred to is an explosion of plasma and material from the sun’s surface known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). The emitted particles are blasted into space but many of them end up directed at the earth.

The result is a geomagnetic storm that results in particles getting pulled into the upper atmosphere, where they interact with nitrogen and oxygen atoms to create colourful, curtain-like emanations.

Thursday night’s event was labelled a G4 on the scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. The scale caps out at G5, which is considered “extreme.”

NOAA was predicting a G3 event for Friday night, which would still turn the lights on for many who aren’t accustomed to the sight.

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The current storms, along with another G4 from earlier this year – a “potentially historic event” which prompted NOAA’s first geomagnetic storm watch since 2005 – come as the sun is reaching the peak of one of its 11-year solar cycles. 

“The past solar max was around 2014 or so, and this one is higher than that,” explained Noël. “This cycle is more intense than the previous cycle and it’s approaching the one that was before that, which was the early 2000s.”

Looking at the sunspot numbers, he figures things will escalate in January and February – prime time for viewing given the early sunsets.

Northern lights in southern skies

The blue, green, purple and pink lights shimmering over spruce trees might be postcard fodder for a lot of Canadians, but the G4 storm spread their dance much further afield than normal, overcoming the light pollution in large cities like Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver and beyond.

Even Atlantic Canadians were gifted strangely pink skies in the waning twilight hours.

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Huge swaths of Asia and Europe, including the U.K., got a rare front-row view, and Americans from northern California, into Texas, Tennessee and up the northeastern seaboard also watched the atmospheric exhibition.

“It’s really rare to see the auroras that far south because they tend to stay around the aurora oval and that’s much higher in latitude,” Noël said.

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While Friday’s geomagnetic forecast may not result in the same coverage, using your camera’s phone will help – its lens is more sensitive to light than the human eye. 

Noël, based in Kingston, Ont., doesn’t see them often at that latitude, and one image he captured, showing a bright structure within the curtain, got him very excited. 

“I couldn’t see it with my naked eye and then when I took my camera with the prolonged exposure, I was able to see it very clearly.

“It looks like auroral structures that I was working on for my doctorate and for which I was developing numerical simulations in order to study how they could be formed and what effects they could have on the ionosphere.”

Impact on infrastructure 

CMEs, when not providing nature’s light show, can be a nuisance for both technology and infrastructure.

It won’t interfere with your cell service or the PlayStation Network, but it can impair GPS-related navigation, often resulting in flights being rerouted, and interfere with low-orbit communication satellites and radio signals.

At G4 levels, it can also intensify ground-induced currents resulting in widespread voltage control problems that can affect the power grid and cause corrosion to railroads, pipelines and bridges. 

To mitigate such effects, builders nowadays attach sacrificial anodes – “The same thing as we do for rust-proofing your car,” Noël explained. The metal alloy eats up the electrolytes that would otherwise oxidize the construction metal.

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