PSA: aurora on red alert

I’m right on the South Coast, faint greens and reds over 270 degrees and straight up!

If your phone camera is on night mode and taking 3-4 second exposures…

Abandoned church behind my house. Photos untouched from iPhone camera.

Beåmish

Also near the south coast and never thought that the first time I’d see the aurora borealis would be from my bedroom window.

Yup shit got real, forget the fakey exposure photos, staring straight up at the sky tonight is truly special. Stripes, radiance, hue changes. Wow.

Amazing.  Thank you from Buckinghamshire for the heads up.

Just want to add, that’s my back garden. How amazing that I could see something like that!

dartmoor earlier.

Visible down on the south coast in Worthing….blimey! Never thought I’d see this without having to head far north so very chuffed.  Can’t upload pics to STW tho…

Visible in north Wales, near dyfi bike park too, but can’t upload pics

My photo attempts from Sabden nr Clitheroe. Hundreds of cars over all the moorland and hilltop roads.

We took a mooch up to Herbert’s Quarry at the top of the Black Mountain road. Both the carparks and all the pull ins were full of parked cars. Everyone is enjoying the show 😃

Including the insta-fluenca **** who think it’s OK to park across the road to get the perfect shot, this delaying the rest of the traffic (such as it was) ****!

So my Samsung S22 is working it’s magic, you take the photo and then before your eyes it is enhanced. Although very vivid I like the more subtle shots above, can I tell it to show me the original photo somehow?

I was going to try my digital camera but decided it was better to use my eyes and the phone than fiddle with DSLR camera settings and miss it!

I should of taken my pics in raw and jpeg. Forgot my spare battery as well .

a few more, I’m staggered how good the iPhone pro camera with a tripod is. Between 10-30s exposures on these. No editing.

Had my rx100 in the bag but it stayed there.

Taken about an hour ago, between 11.00 and midnight, just outside Biddestone in Wiltshire, facing north with no light pollution.

my Samsung S22 is working it’s magic, you take the photo and then before your eyes it is enhanced. Although very vivid I like the more subtle shots above, can I tell it to show me the original photo somehow?

It’s not that simple.  My night vision is much better than Mr TW’s so what I see may be considered to be enhanced compared to what he sees.  Modern cameras are really good at seeing well in the dark.

My photo above, is not far off what I could actually see. However my eyes were less punchy at the colours but massively better at seeing the white stars. Nothing has been added into the photo, its basically just a long (but steady)  exposure.

My night vision is much better than Mr TW’s so what I see may be considered to be enhanced compared to what he sees.

This. I was looking for quite a while and wondering if it was – I could see what looked like pale ‘sunbeam in a dusty room’ effects but no colours and then as my eyes adjusted I started to pick up a faint reddish purple. So I went and woke my wife up* and also got my son out of his room and gave them a ‘give time for your eyes to adjust’ to manage expectations. And as my son walked out the door he was immediately ‘Wow!!’ I feel very very slightly cheated by having to use a phone screen to really see it, but that’s the rub of being old i guess.

[edit – just thinking that through, why’s that weird? Do people with hearing aids feel cheated because they need them to hear a concert or play? It would only be authentic if they didn’t use them?]

* massive gamble……if it had been shit I may not be here to type today given her affinity with her bed after bedtime is reached!

Well I’m assuming my phone was doing some processing as when I took a photo the thumbnail would be quite dark and you could bring it to full screen, then a moment later it would suddenly change to vivid colours.  It might have just been just HDR processing as I was deliberately getting the horizon in and there is quite a lot of light pollution here from the town and mega floodlights nearby which lights everything up.

Watched it for about half an hour in the garden before bed last night, amazing!  Also took the risk of waking the wife, shes glad I did so that worked out alright 😄

Took some pics but my ageing Samsung S20 wasnt really upto the job TBH

It’s interesting what timidwheeler is saying as i hadn’t thought of it like that as the colours were much more muted when i went out to look than pics on this thread; i considered the cameras were doing a lot of the heavy lifting to enhance the colours (including on my wife’s photos she was taking; the colours were incredible compared to what we were actually seeing).

However i was out with my young adult kids too and then didn’t suggest they could see the colours anymore vibrantly…maybe we all just have poor night vision!

So now to my science questions. I could look up on the web but I like having a discussion on here. Below is what i know or from a general interest BBC article from yesterday.

Sun is having a storm ‘currently’ and ejecting charged particles that are interacting with the gases in the atmosphere which make them glow. Nitrogen is greenish, oxygen is blue-purple which is why they are the colours we see in the photos, as that’s what the atmosphere is mainly.

I described above ‘sunbeams in a dusty room’ and they’re visible in many of the (amazing) photos. What’s causing this then? Is this ‘particles travelling in straight lines’ or is that us actually seeing the earth’s magnetic field?

Films i’ve seen of the aurora ‘dancing’ – is that fluctuations in the magnetic field in real time, and are those films sped up? Stuff was obviously evolving last night but I wouldn’t have called it dancing…do you just need to be further north (or south) ‘cos the earth’s magnetic field is stronger at the poles?

And last for now – I said ‘currently’ but how long do these particles take to get to us? I mean it’s current for us, but they could have left the sun minutes, hours, days, years…. ago. I have a recollection at the speed of light, the sun’s light takes 9 mins approx to get to us so what we’re seeing happened 9 mins ago (let’s not do temporal relativism in universal space today) but when was this storm? We say it’s currently having a solar storm but is it? Do observations of solar flares and mass gas ejections* match up with the lights?

* not in the sense of a lentil based diet at a 70’s music festival

Damn missed it. Had a look and tried a few pics at around 10:30 and got nothing. One of our neighbours posted a pic from 11:15 similar to above.

Some nice pics you all got above.

I set myself up at a good spot with a nice view north. And then realised it was all kicking off in the east and the south !!

gutted was fast asleep

I’m just here to say that I hope you all have your faces eaten off by triffids. x

Beadnell, Northumberland. Dragged Wifey out to see the lights just after a mate had sent a message that he could see them in Northants.

A privilege to see the Northern Lights in fantastic conditions stood on Beadnell Bay Beach at midnight. Bucket list stuff right there.

stuff like this makes me wonder if there is a god with an overall design. I mean, yeah science explains the how but what’s the why? if not to make us look up in amazement and go ‘I wonder?’

[tongue in cheek, but I’m nearly 55 and that’s the first time I’ve seen the aurora and it left me quite emotional at how beautiful it was]

Not to be outdone, today I learnt that there are “Southern Lights”, courtesy of an old school mate in New Zealand, who had the same show last night.

No idea why I got to 55 before discovering this.

but what’s the why? if not to make us look up in amazement and go ‘I wonder?

What interests me is what is the evolutionary advantage of humans appreciating beautiful things in the natural world?

I doubt that many other mammals do and presumably there is an evolutionary advantage since it is so pronounced, obvious, and universal, in humans.

What’s the chances tonight ?  11-12 May ?Missed it as I was suffering a bit of heat stroke (out camping, boarding and riding). Would have been ideal in Bala.

I’m no anthropologist, but can imagine that a sense of awe at the world might drive a desire to survive and see more of it? Or even foster the question of what else is there? That might drive exploration and expansion into new places?

I tried to find when it was arriving so I searched and the only place I found said it wasn’t coming until 5am so I didn’t bother. Gutted I missed it.

That might drive exploration and expansion into new places?

Yeah that makes sense – a beautiful valley with a river full of clear water might well be both attractive and a good place to live – even grazing animals might be attracted.

But some of it doesn’t make any sense – a beautiful mountain? An arch formed by the ocean? The thing is the attraction can be really quite powerful.

Great pics!

Loving seeing all the images – we could even see them waaaaay down south (we’re about 15miles North of the Lizard)

Had a look – the sky was bright through the gaps in the thin layer of cloud.  It’s always cloudy,

We had the ‘beams of light through dust’ in Pembroke. Absolutely gobsmacked all the Listers. How amazing was it that lots of us had clear skies last night?!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my social media feed so positive and happy!

Edit: the white beams in this photo are from a streetlight but I liked them in the photo!

I have really poor colour sight so I usually find northern lights very underwhelming/invisible. So enhanced photos are the only way for me to see it. Last night was the exception though, even my rubbish eyes could see it.

There’s a fair chance for tonight being good again. The solar storm continues right now, and is expected to go on to Sunday. It’s caused by a sunspot 4 times the size of the earth, with a solar storm threat alert issued at level 5, not seen since 2003. clear skies forecast tonight here on the south coast so I’m gonna be out. In fact I may even ride my bike to the top of the nearest hill…