PHOENIX — The Northern Lights sure put on a show for Arizona Friday night!
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning when a solar outburst reached Earth on Friday afternoon. The effects were due to last through the weekend and possibly into next week.
Arizonans in Flagstaff, Prescott Valley, Cottonwood and Groom Creek all caught photos of lights in the sky.
What do the different colors of the Northern Lights mean?
The colors of the Northern Lights depend on the level of solar activity and the sun's charged particles reacting to gasses in the atmosphere. The color depends on the types of gasses involved.
Arizona saw a lot of pinks and purples in the sky. The pink colors only happen during intense solar activity and are caused by "excited atomic oxygen" at high altitudes. The purples are ionized molecular nitrogen, which is uncommon in lower altitudes.
NOAA is calling this an unusual event, pointing out that the flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth. An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003 took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.
Several X users as far south as Florida and Texas posted photos and videos of the colorful skies.
Using eclipse glasses to see CMEs
If you still have eclipse glasses, they may come in handy this weekend. Using solar eclipse glasses, you can see the cause of the massive solar storm.
The solar storm is an eruption on the surface of the sun that's sending jets of particles streaming toward Earth, called Coronal Mass Ejections.
"The sun gets this active region on it, and it starts to get excited, and eventually releases this burst of particles," ASU assistant professor Katrina Bossert said.
The active regions, Bossert said, are clusters of sunspots on the sun, which you can see without a telescope.
If you still have eclipse glasses, Bossert said, you can look at the sun and see a dark spot at the bottom of the sun. Those are the sunspots.
But again, only look at the sun through eclipse glasses. Similar to the dangers posed by looking at a solar eclipse without proper eye protection, the same dangers are present for the solar storm.
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