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Aurora Borealis visible in Ontario tonight
GTA could see spectacular Northern Lights tonight
August 03, 2010
Lesley Ciarula Taylor
If we’re lucky, the sky Tuesday night will explode into a dazzling light show.
“We might see it straight overhead,” Dr. Ralph Chou, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Toronto centre told the Star Tuesday.
“We might end up with something quite spectacular. We’ve been waiting a long time for something like this to happen.”
What’s happened is a coronal mass ejection, a shotgun-like blast of energy that has burst out of the sun and is pointed directly at Earth. Astronomers spotted it Sunday and it’s heading this way.
That blast could set off a kaleidoscope overnight — meaning any time before dawn — of Northern Lights visible far farther south than usual, and illuminating the sky over Greater Toronto.
“The sun has been quiet for the last few years,” said Chou. “The last time the sun was very, very active, there was a lot of bright auroras overhead as far south as the southern United States.”
If tonight’s show lives up to its billing, “You will see the colours very well or at least shimmering lights” despite the light pollution the cities of the GTA spew into the sky.
“This is a very, very large shock front,” said Chou. “By the time it reaches us, it will have spread out quite a bit, so it will be a global phenomenon.”
NASA’s new Solar Dynamics Observatory, a probe launched Feb. 11, picked up the first vivid images of the sun’s explosions.
SDO scientists described Sunday’s burst as “the first signs that the sun is waking up and heading toward another solar maximum.”
The last one was in 2001, the top of an 11-year cycle.
Right now, solar particles are streaming down the field lines toward the Earth’s poles. The particles crash with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, setting off a glow of rippling curtains of green and red lights, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The best approach, said Chou, is just to wait until dark then go outside and look up. He may do that in his western Mississauga backyard or go to the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, now run by the society.
The observatory grounds will be open to the public for the stellar event.
Before he goes out, though, Chou will put his computer on standby, “just in case.”
The sunburst is energy and that energy could fry communications satellites, trip transformer stations, create power surges, or zap airplane passengers with a little extra dose of radiation, he said.
Then again, it could all just fizzle and the most anyone will see is something that looks like clouds, even in a clear sky, warned Chou.
“Heaven knows.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/art...ht-show-tonight
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