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Met Office says Northern Lights will be visible in England tonight and tomorrow
- jnsaff2 4y agoNot just England. We just went to see them at our nearest beach in Tallinn.
- Teever 4y agoI've always assumed that the Northern Lights were quite a common site in Tallinn? I just looked it up and the latitude of the place I'm from in Canada is about in the middle between Tallinn and London. We usually see the Northern Lights here several times year, With exceptionally prominent displays occurring at least at least once every 2-3 years. I did not expect how often Americans would ask me about the Northern Lights when I visited there for a few months many years ago. They were often so fascinated and slightly envious/baffled by how blasé I felt about something so incredible because it was so common to me.
- Symbiote 4y agoThe magnetic pole is in Canada, so you don't need to be anywhere near as for north.
- Teever 4y agoAh, that makes sense, I knew there was deviation between the magnetic pole and north pole, but I did not think it was that large. Thanks.
- b112 4y agoIt's not just here, we created it, out of the sheer, unmitigated, unrelented politeness we exude. Also sorry for being too polite.
- version_five 4y agoI'm also Canadian, the ones I know are not polite, maybe passive aggressive that gets confused with polite by other cultures. I've generally found Americans more polite.
- seszett 4y agoI think Anglo Canadians like to think they are polite, but I have no idea where that comes from. They're certainly not polite with French speakers in any case.
- b112 4y agoWhat a bizarre thing to say! To most from French cultures, not speaking french is "rude". French Quebeckers will often even pretend to not know english. Yet here we have someone claiming anglos are "rude" to french speakers? In what way? Because, I presume, they do not speak french?
- seszett 4y ago> Yet here we have someone claiming anglos are "rude" to french speakers? In what way? The "Speak white" in parliament is something that is hard to forget even if it was long ago now. But yes, berating French speakers for speaking French in a French-speaking province is actually rude. In none of the "French cultures" I know, is not speaking French rude. What is rude is assuming everyone speaks your own language everywhere. I'm not here to write an essay on cohabitation between languages in multilingual countries (which I could) though, but I would like you to read your own comment again and ask yourself whether it exudes politeness at all. And maybe, whether your aggressive-defensive knee-jerk reaction to a mention of French speakers might be the reason Quebecers tend to consider Anglos the opposite of polite.
- b112 4y agoI think your comment highlights the issue's source, far more than your assertions about mine.
- xaedes 4y agoThe magnetic north pole is wandering pretty fast. Currently magnetic north pole is at coordinates 86.146, 146.826 [1] - right in the arctic ocean. It is not in Canada for quite some years. [1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml
- nemetroid 4y agoThe geomagnetic north pole is the relevant one. It is located in northern Canada, around 80.7, -72.7, and moves much slower. Your link mentions this, too: > Based on the WMM2020 coefficients for 2020.0 the geomagnetic north pole is at 72.68°W longitude and 80.65°N latitude, […] Although geomagnetic pole positions cannot be observed, they are arguably of greater significance than the dip poles because the auroral ovals (approximate 5° latitude bands where the spectacular aurora is likely visible) are closely centered on the geomagnetic poles.
- xaedes 4y agoOh, yes indeed. Thanks for pointing out my confusion and the difference between those two!
- mr_woozy 4y ago[dead]
- Gordonjcp 4y agothe latitude of the place I'm from in Canada is about in the middle between Tallinn and London. That'd place you at about the north of England, maybe around Newcastle. I'd expect with clear skies and a dark environment to the north you'd have seen last night's display from that far south.
- las3r 4y agoSame, visible last night in the northern part of the Netherlands as well.
- jrmg 4y agoIt is now ‘tonight’ in England. Are they visible?
- dan1234 4y agoNot in the north east, where it’s cloudy as usual.
- stuartq 4y agoIt's very cloudy for me in NW England.
- mhandley 4y agoIt's clear in West London, but nothing visible at the moment, even on a 60 second camera exposure. Not a great surprise - we're a long way south, a lot of light polution, and the moon is still up - but worth a try. Edit: 02:30 UTC - moon has set now, but still nothing on a long camera exposure.
- wkat4242 4y agoProbably too much light pollution :(
- sva_ 4y agoThey were even faintly visible from Germany, if you go back some hours on https://amrum.panomax.com/norddorf https://amrum.panomax.com/norddorf
- kebman 4y agoI saw the Aurora in Oslo, Norway about a month ago. It's the first time in my life I saw it that far south. I grew up in Tromsø, where it was pretty common, but man... You never get "used" to really good Aurora. It's always amazing.
- blamazon 4y ago"The aurora borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your kitchen?" https://youtu.be/JJl-mlUYNZE?t=2m7s https://youtu.be/JJl-mlUYNZE?t=2m7s
- pettycashstash2 4y agoI love hacker news. We geek out on aurora borealis. What I am more grateful of is that the community is so diverse ; Norway, Poland, England, Estonia, Netherlands and the list goes on.
- neverrroot 4y agoHope you’ll have clear sky. It’s worth the effort and patience, every single one is different in appearance, just an awesome phenomenon. Happy hunting!
- photochemsyn 4y agoSooner or later we're going to get plastered by a direct coronal mass ejection. Backup to nickel while you still can: https://longnow.org/ideas/very-long-term-backup/ https://longnow.org/ideas/very-long-term-backup/ There was a near miss in 2012. These things are not than uncommon, on a century-scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event We had a miss in 2012: https://youtu.be/sg3NAdOYp8Q https://youtu.be/sg3NAdOYp8Q
- blibble 4y ago"Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information." finally my backup strategy of tens of thousands of pages of dot matrix printing on continuous feed paper has been validated
- samstave 4y agoIn 1998 we had a super security conscious CTO. He had me come in each morning and go over the logs for the servers on our VOIP product - which fed to a line-printer (dot matrix) in real-time and would spit out a ton of paper. (as much as I hated this, I love the sound of dot-matrix printers) I had to go through the logs with a highlighter and highlight out anything suspicious... This was the mid-late 90s and we were one of the few companies to have already adoped Linux to production at that time. Some of our employees were the authors of H.323 and some other protocols - and flourished out to all sorts of your streaming techs today.
- jfk13 4y agoHah, reminds me of when my university account was going to be closed down (this would've been in the early 80s), and I had some files I wanted to preserve. So one evening, I sent them to the card punch, and then lugged the resulting boxes home on my bicycle. (At this point, I've no idea what eventually became of those boxes, though...)
- theamk 4y ago> Estimates of the storm strength (Dst) range from −0.80 to −1.75 µT. So.. less than Earth's ambient magnetic field? While low power, long distance lines (like telegraph or POTS) would be in trouble, and maaaybe some network cards would burn our due to long Ethernet wires, storage devices and many computers would be fine. If you are super worried, seal some hard drives in food tins - the frequency is pretty low so it doesn't even have to be fully airtight.
- throwaway12245 4y agoHere's the best aurora forecast tool : https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast from NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. Looks like cloud free parts of Canada are in for a show (minus the most populated part). [edited, thank you, anthomtb]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- techsolomon 4y agosee also: https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast
- dekerta 4y agoI like taking photos of the aurora, and I often use NOAA's forecasts to plan sightings. I wanted the forecast in a simple non-video format, and was tired of doing the mental math converting from UTC, so I made my own tool to show Kp forecast values (from NOAA) in the user's local timezone. Here it is in case it can be useful to anyone else: https://auroraoutlook.com https://auroraoutlook.com Obviously, it's pretty bare bones. You need to have an understanding of which Kp value is needed to see the lights at your latitude. I'm working on adding more features to make it more user friendly
- emsixteen 4y agoNice one. Would be nice to have it location based, not just adjust to timezone. Another great tool from over here that I've made use of a lot is Tromsø Geophysical Observatory's magnetometer stackplots page[1], but not for forecasting obviously. [1] https://flux.phys.uit.no/stackplot/ https://flux.phys.uit.no/stackplot/
- e12e 4y agoSee also https://site.uit.no/spaceweather/data-and-products/aurora/tromso/ https://site.uit.no/spaceweather/data-and-products/aurora/tr...
- paul7986 4y agoDarn it as I been chasing them recently in Iceland and this past Tuesday I got a flight to Fairbanks, AK(im in Baltimore). That flight got canceled but I could have rescheduled it. Though I caught Covid two days after. My Aurora app says the lights should be visible in Fairbanks next Sunday and Monday, of course cloud cover kills your chances of seeing it but as of now looks partly sunny those days.
- milleramp 4y agoDarn, wish I was there.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cluoma 4y agoI live pretty far north in Canada and have been making nightly timelapses trying to catch the northern lights. What surprised me the most is how common they are here. Most nights, they will be visible for a few minutes or more, weather permitting. So far today it’s clear skies so looking forward to tonight.
- idlewords 4y agoIf you've never seen the northern lights, it's really worth finding any excuse to go do. Videos can give you an idea of what it's like, but there's something deep in the animal brain that reacts to the sky being full of shimmering, spooky light, that is really impossible to describe or to capture on film. Just like a solar eclipse, the aurora is one of those celestial phenomena that you really have to experience firsthand, at least once in your life. It's worth the hassle!
- rtkwe 4y agoI'm going up to Alaska this summer with my in-laws and the one thing I'm super sad about is I definitely won't be able to see them.
- throwntoday 4y agoOn the plus side you get to enjoy the midnight sun. It's a pretty unique experience. And now you have an excuse to visit again!
- humanizersequel 4y agoNot quite midnight sun, but one of the most magical experiences of my life was staying up all night on the side of a proglacial river and watching the sun go down... just to have it come up again an hour or so later a couple mountains to the right. It never even fully went down, which is why I never fully went to sleep.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoI live in such an area. The sun technically goes down for a few hours every night in the summer - but it stays just below the horizon. I can read outside at night, and it is more akin to night being a few hours of early sunset that bleeds into late sunrise. It was honestly more magical 9 or 10 years ago when I first got here, but I still enjoy it.
- rtkwe 4y ago
- andrew_ 4y agoSaw them once in Northern Michigan and it blew my mind. Definitely an experience to have before you kick the bucket.
- User23 4y agoMany Americans might not realize that London is 51.5 degrees north, so seeing the northern lights there isn’t as surprising as seeing them somewhere far to the south like Toronto.
- nemetroid 4y agoToronto and London are roughly equidistant from the North Geomagnetic Pole. Aurora borealis is visible at much lower latitudes in North America compared to Europe.
- samstave 4y agopLEASE POST PICS HERE IS YOURE able. Thanks
- ggm 4y agoFor the duration of this window, https://www.reddit.com/r/Edinburgh/new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Edinburgh/new/ has some. They're 4-8h old at the time I post, but would still be found in sort new if you walk back to the window of time. There are also some at https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/new/ (none of these are my work btw. I'm not there) I believe many of them to be "visible to my camera, not visible to me" class images. I saw the aurora once in Edinburgh 4-5 decades ago and it was decidedly Meh (for much this reason) -And again 3 decades ago I saw Aurora Australis in Tasmania and it was much less "meh" for the reasons of dark sky and 13 degrees more polar lattitude than Edinburgh (42 vs 55)
- davidw 4y agoI saw that they were also visible in Spokane, WA, which isn't that far north.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agohttps://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/nov/17/weathercatch-when-and-why-the-northern-lights-dazz/ https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/nov/17/weathercatch-w... You might be able see them on a clear moonless night between march and September, which mostly rules out Seattle (we have too much light pollution anyways).
- tastyfreeze 4y agoHere is an aurora forecast site. A great tool to help you catch an aurora. https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast
- abruzzi 4y agoin 1989 the aurora was visible in southern New Mexico (latitude about 32.2 degrees.) So it does get pretty far from the poles on rare occasion.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoThere were a couple of massive geomagnetic storms in 1989 and radio propagation was incredible during the peak of the sunspot cycle. The Sun has been weirdly energetic for about 150 years or so, with far more thermal and electromagnetic output than history would suggest.
- reitanqild 4y agoCareful: suggesting that the sun has emitted far more thermal energy the last 150 years might give people ideas /s On a related note: Now I am interested and I wonder if the change is big enough to make a difference on the earth and if it has been accounted for in the models. Say it has...
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI mean, if you plot solar activity and global temperatures, there is a correlation. But, you've all seen those graphs of totally unrelated things that show a correlation. So, it must absolutely only be caused by humans, right? Because there's no way the most energetic thing for 100 million miles fluctuating wildly in its energy output could cause matching fluctuations in a planet's atmosphere, right?
- implements 4y agohttps://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/189/graphic-temperature-vs-solar-activity/ https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/189/graphic-tempe... ”The amount of solar energy Earth receives has followed the Sun’s natural 11-year cycle of small ups and downs, with no net increase since the 1950s. Over the same period, global temperature has risen markedly. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past half-century.”
- zh3 4y agoThere has long been a live page from lancs.ac.uk [0] - it's currently showing the very high values from last night. Slightly strangely - and a slight chance of being related - we've had multiple power cuts here (Sussex) throughout the night and since the last one the mains voltage is way down (182v vs the normal 230-ish according to the UPS). [0]https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/ https://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/
- zlib 4y agoAwful website. After accepting, dismissing pop ups I still couldn’t scroll after 10 seconds on my phone
- bluehatbrit 4y agoI was reading through the comments waiting for this. It's just one of the local news sites / papers for the area, it's quite terrible in many ways really. I was very surprised to see it on HN this morning.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoMe too. It's a cesspit of loathing and hate if you dare go into the comments there.
- Neil44 4y agoNot to mention that this is the Bristol Post, an area that willl not be able to see the northern lights described in the article...
- sprkwd 4y agoTypical Bristol Post article then.
- gnfargbl 4y agoTry installing a pi-hole in your home network. I set one up more for curiosity than anything else, but an unexpected side effect was that these local news websites, which were previously completely unusable on mobile, suddenly became just about tolerable again.
- weberer 4y agoWorks great with javascript disabled.
- nly 4y agoTV has ruined the aurora. Seen them 3 times in Scandinavia and it's never been as vivid as on TV. Sitting out in the wilderness roasting things on a fire waiting for them is a great experience though.
- jinnko 4y agoThe MetOffice update: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/specialist-forecasts/space-weather https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/specialist-forecasts/sp...
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they were visible from England. They were very bright even down south here at 56°N, way brighter than normal.
- globular-toast 4y agoI'm on the internet all the time and I've never---not once---seen one of these articles before the event actually happens. It's quite frustrating. It was a clear night last night. Overcast tonight.
- ta1243 4y agoUnlikely, it's rare to have a nice clear night in the UK
- cph123 4y agoI was flying over from Dublin to Birmingham on Sunday evening around just after 10pm but I didn't see much out the window, would've been pretty cool if I had though.
- Taniwha 4y agoVisible here in Southern New Zealand right now
- staringback 4y agoIt must be pretty powerful if you can see the Northern Lights in New Zealand
- Taniwha 4y agoHard to tell if you're trolling or not, the sort of solar mass ejections that drive today's Aurora strike both hemispheres
- staringback 4y agoAnd what are the lights called when they are in that hemisphere?
- robtaylor 4y agoReach PLC network bait makes HN frontpage?! Amazing!
- udev 4y agoFunny how it is on the day Brexit is finally completed.
- hoyd 4y agoOnce Kristian Birkeland proved how northern lights actually worked based on his theory about it, the relation between particles from the sun, earths magnetic field and the poles, a string of norwegian pioneers studied the phenomena for a few decades. Up until 1960 actually. Then, some researchers from scandinavia and US teamed up to establish a facility for launching research rockets into the aurora, as balloons could not get high enough and satellites wasn't a thing really. They agreed on Andøya in northern norway as the perfect spot for such a rocket range. It was also directly under the northern lights oval too. Then in 18th august 1962, they launched the first rocket and has done so ever since. There are still lots to learn from the sun by studying the northern lights in the polar regions. A really exciting story actually.
- pallas_athena 4y agoThey were also visible in Germany: https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2023/02/brandenburg-polarlichter-aurora-borealis-sonneneruption-naturschauspiel.html https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2023/02/brandenburg-po...