PSA: aurora on red alert

Yep, we are heading out tonight…I think youngest_oab and I will go watch from Glen Lyon…

Never seen the aurora until last night. Looked on lots of occasions over the last few years but previously when there were alerts and even photos and local sightings reported in North Yorkshire, I was firmly under cloud. Frankly I thought it was evens that I would never see it. Last night I could see feint colours and shapes with the naked eye and photos revealed vivid colours all around me. Spectacular, although the spaniel was struggling with why I was in the garden with a camera on a tripod at 1 o’clock in the morning.

It was going off here in Hobart,Tasmania tonight.
The whole sky lit up overhead.

^ even my bother in Auckland and friend in India said they could see it…. amazing

Definitely heading out with camera, tripod & Pixel 4a. I wonder what it’ll do in astrophotography mode.

Can’t believe nobody told me 😭

Erm, get yourself the Aurora watch UK app on you phone? Kicked off with red alerts yesterday afternoon. I can’t recall seeing magnetic field numbers anything like this high before.

Looked out about midnight ( Malton, North Yorks) but it seemed to have turned a little misty so went back to bed. Fingers crossed it stays clear tonight.

Was very excited to see this in Kent  we went to Iceland last year and saw nothing  😆

That’s one ticked off bucket list for lots of you!

Are these pics genuine or has the phone done a lot of heavy lifting? The colours are incredible!

They don’t look like that to the naked eye, but they still look impressive.

Are these pics genuine or has the phone done a lot of heavy lifting? The colours are incredible!

The human eye struggles with colour in low-light situations, I have seen aurora before, in ‘82 I think it was, when there was a particularly cold winter with lots of snow. Driving back from Basingstoke with a mate at stupid o’clock in the morning, near Avebury, I pulled over and  turned the car off and got out, my mate asking what’s up, I just said tell me if you can see what I think I’ve just seen. We stood there in complete darkness watching these shimmering curtains of purple and green.

Last night I could see the rays and shafts, but they were more like gauzy curtains, the colours were very subtle and diffused. I had my phone on long exposure night mode, about 30 seconds, some sat down with my phone resting on my knees, others I was actually lying flat on my back, on the grass at the entrance to a field. Some were taken using the roof rails of my car as a rest – the engine was off and no lights on. Modern phone cameras take multiple exposures then do some clever software processing. I can see it getting even better with the fast built in AI that’s being developed.
Just as I’d parked in the entrance to a field, a battered 4×4 pulled up, curious as to what I was doing – one of the blokes was the local gamekeeper, with a nightvision scope – thanks to him, keeping his eye on things, like hare coursers, the local hare population has increased from around 7 or 8 to 135!
Another from last night…

Missed last night, heading out tonight – I can’t decide if I can be bothered to get my proper camera out or just go with my phone.

Are these pics genuine or has the phone done a lot of heavy lifting? The colours are incredible!

I was just using my phone, handheld, with a 6 second exposure. At first, I wasn’t going to bother because, looking up, there seemed to be a hazy layer of cloud. The more I looked at it, and my eyes adjusted, the more I was able to discern that the “cloud” was actually green, and some of the dark spots beside this cloud were actually purple. I can definitely get more vivid colours using a longer exposure and then there’s also the possibility of applying some manual post-processing, but I don’t do that as it begins to look a bit false (and there are many examples of this on this thread).

Anyway, it’s a good but cloudier tonight so I’m not expecting anything special.

Looking on the AuroraWatch app, which I downloaded earlier due to missing out last night, the chances of seeing anything in the Midlands is slim tonight ☹️

Is there a certain time to see the aurora, if it’s visible in my area tonight?
Getting pretty dark outside but wondering if it’s just a case of waiting until it’s properly dark or for a particular time.

Aurora watch app showing amber at the moment and the bars on the graph are pretty low.

NOAA forecast map has gone quiet too

Back to red alert now but levels less than half of last night at moment.

Just got a red alert ping up here on Mull but it’s still not dark enough to see anything

Any ideas if it will be showing in Southampton and if so, when?

I have seen the photos from last night from people in the area so I thought I might go outside and look but don’t want to be stood outside for hours.

North of Inverness, still not dark enough but I can see the moon so promising

Any ideas if it will be showing in Southampton and if so, when?

no, there’s no real forecasting of this as far as I’m aware. The AuroraWatch app shows things have picked up again, albeit less than half of last nights activity. But it’s not a forecast, only a look at what’s happened in the last hour. We are though in the midst of a nice big solar storm and we have clear skies.  If you’re ever gonna see it in Southampton you’re gonna have to take opportunities like this and don’t hold your breath.

If you follow Cumbria Northern Lights on Facebook they’ve been showing forecasts from a place in the USA, which might help, but I’ve no more info than that

Nothing in South Wales, too hazy.

From the lack of photos on my social media feed this morning, I’d say nothing much happened last night. Which was good as I really needed some sleep.

Cloudy in Highlands. Checked 130 til 2, no show

Nice red glow to the sky last night…..oh wait it’s the local nature reserve hill on fire.

Finland here, had some great ones on the south coast the night before last. My spouse saw em for the first time ever – best auroras in about 20 years. They are usually much farther north, and the ones south are often just greens – now there were vivid purples and pinks, at times half the sky was full of colour blooms.

Were lying on our backs on a nearby cliff in the woods, for close to an hour.

Last night went again, but no luck.

Some pics from a local paper – https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000010419087.html

Pretty special in Warwickshire

The finest of light shows in West Yorkshire

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cglv53402mko

Are these pics genuine or has the phone done a lot of heavy lifting? The colours are incredible!

A philosophical question – we’ve all seen pictures of the aurora just now, on social media, on TV news, and in newspapers – heck, I’ve posted them myself. But NOBODY has seen anything like what is shared with their naked eye. And yet there seems to be a tacit agreement that this phenomenon happened when in fact it did not. Would we accept this in any other context – news stories about something that didn’t happen, photos that are completely unrepresentative of reality? Your thoughts?

I asked this on p2

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?]

Wait until you realise that colours don’t exist anyway – it’s just your brain interpreting various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation absorbed by your eyes.

Why they do not look so good by naked eye is mostly due to light pollution. Any city lights nearby wash out the colours. When viewed in more remote locations – away from city lights – they are much brighter and saturated. Say go to Finnish Lapland in the winter – sky is totally dark and no lights nearby, and then they will look just like in the best pictures.

I live in a city, and we went to a small wooded area, to lay down on our backs and it took a while for eyes to adjust. Still washed out, as there are plenty of light sources nearby. But close to what the pics look like with longer exposures.

Same thing with stargazing – if you have never been looking at stars 100 km away from the nearest city, you probably have no idea what the sky looks like really.

Friends have a caravan in a light-pollution free area near Welshpool. They got the God Beam, lucky sods 👍

I’ve seen some pretty impressive lights in the Highlands, really amazing green red and purple, the beams and waves, plus I was lucky to see them in the Arctic years ago. No light pollution. But I’ve never seen the intense colours present in any of the images I’ve seen in recent times on social media. It sort of devalues it for me, I’m not bothered about getting an Instagram photo, I just enjoy the experience of it happening overhead, so they’re pictures of something I’ll never see

55 years I’ve waited to see them, and from a scientist’s viewpoint being able to ‘see’ a scientific phenomenon usually requires instruments, particularly fields like magnetism and particle physics. In this case you could see them but whether because my eyes are old and ****, or light pollution, or whatever only faintly. My son’s eyes saw them better, at least from what he described. Whether with the naked eye or not it was happening in my back garden and I’m kind of sorry you feel it’s devalued because you need instruments. Reset expectations, the colours are astonishing if you look properly. A phone camera isn’t inventing the colours, just revealing them.

Notwithstanding my post above, it was a great experience – I was sitting on a rock by the coast with strangers I couldn’t see but we were sharing a connection and enjoying the awesome (sorry) spectacle together. My question was somewhat around whether this was a bit on the line between photos we accept as enhanced (astro for example) and photos we expect to be somewhat accurate. Or perhaps it is about photos that express what it was LIKE to be there. I certainly felt like the sky was full of bright colours, even though I know objectively that it wasn’t.

I went out to look for it at around midnight last night (Saturday night) but didn’t see anything. Gutted to have not heard about it in time to see it on Friday.