When the sun gets feisty, Earth’s atmosphere can literally light up. But seeing the resulting aurora isn’t always easy
Imagine standing under the starry vault, bundled against the cold, when the sky erupts overhead. Rippling curtains, ribbons and streamers of colors across the rainbow light up the night, shimmering and majestic and all eerily silent.
They come in many shapes as well, from curtains and sheets to streaks, undulating “dunes” and even spirals. Sometimes they seem stable and unmoving, and other times they can flicker and dance like waves that crash across the sky in seconds.The sun has a fiendishly complex magnetic field created by the motions of ionized gas called plasma in its interior.
These ions are like subatomic bullets that hit atoms and molecules in our upper atmosphere and rip away their electrons, which are like shrapnel. When these charged particles reconnect, a little bit of light is emitted with a color that is characteristic of the particular atom or molecule involved. Outside of colors, the forms an aurora can take arise from exactly how a solar outburst reshapes a portion of Earth’s magnetic field. Sometimes the interaction is weak, and only a soft glow is seen. Other times the impact of the particles forms long vertical sheets, which can appear as wavy folds like a drape—in fact, these kinds of auroral shapes are called curtains.
If you live in the midlatitudes, as most people in the U.S. do, and you get an alert that a solar storm is occurring, your best bet to see an aurora is to find a dark site away from city lights. It’s particularly important to have no bright lights to your north because the auroras will lie in that direction. Once you’ve reached your dark site and your eyes have adapted to the darkness, first look toward the horizon; our round planet makes more distant events appear close to the ground.
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