The sun has been carrying a blotch of sunspots for the past week and she finally tossed her cookies. A Coronal Mass Ejection shot out on January 7 and it will slam into the earth tomorrow, 4 AM Cape Ann time.
Who cares? Well, you likely will not notice it unless you pull on the woolens and get out there between 4 and 5 AM in the morning tomorrow and look north from as dark a place as possible. It is possible that as the CME slams into the Van Allen Belt we will get some northern lights all the way down to our latitude. (Lat43, like the bar.)
[edit 01/09/2014] Aurora show was a dud last night. The Kp value never rose above 3. At Lat 43 We need a Kp of at least 7 to get a decent aurora. If you saw something last night I’ll have what you’re smoking.
BREAKING NEWS: Sun Puke was slow in getting here!
Today (Thursday), additional material associated with that explosion on the sun is expected to hit Earth. Its arrival is actually a little bit later than what was anticipated. A strong geomagnetic storm is now expected to continue tonight into Friday morning. This will give us another and perhaps better opportunity to see the Northern Lights.
Good Morning Gloucester 
if it looks like that i will call you later 🙂
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I have my tinfoil hat on already!
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You might want to stay away from tinfoil if it turns out to be like the 1859 coronal mass ejection:
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks.[7] Telegraph pylons threw sparks.[8] Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[9]
Nowadays, satellites could fall from the sky! ;-(
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I hope you’re going to be out there taking pictures to share with us. Are you saying we should unplug our computer and stuff that we don’t want to have fried?
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Unfortunately off island so I don’t have dark skies. Chances are slim but if an 1859 storm arrived unplugging your computer would do no good. Telegraph keys started tapping without being attached to an electrical source. They cancelled a delivery to the space station tonight because they did not want it doing a fireball into the Pacific.
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The occupants of the International Space Station are experiencing yet another delay in the resupply mission thanks to this. The Jan, 8th rocket launch from Wallops Island was scrubbed yesterday:
http://news.yahoo.com/huge-solar-flare-delays-private-rocket-launch-space-143436537.html
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http://spaceweather.com/
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Aurora show was a dud last night. The Kp value never rose above 3. At Lat 43 We need a Kp of at least 7 to get a decent aurora. If you saw something last night I’ll have what you’re smoking.
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Very nice shot here and is that the newly remodeled fish shack at the cove? 🙂
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The Washington Post has an article today 7/24/2014 about coronal mass ejections. It turns out we dodged the bullet back in 2012.
http://wapo.st/1pflNxe
A 12% chance we are going to be smoked in the next ten years? I think I need more tinfoil.
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