‘The Super Bowl of space weather’: How to see the Northern Lights again

Barely a month after witnessing the solar eclipse, sky watchers stood awestruck at another cosmic show early Saturday.

Streaks of jewel tones — purple and gorgeous green — flickered across the night sky, a display of undulating curtains normally seen in the polar region. And yet in much less remote areas, the Northern Lights, or the aurora borealis, appeared over suburban Chicago neighborhoods and even further south, above the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico.

“Millions of people who probably have never seen an aurora before have gotten to see it just in the last day, all around the world,” said Michelle Nichols, the Adler Planetarium’s director of public observing.

The Northern Lights were expected to be visible again Saturday night, more so in the northern latitudes, basically from the Chicago area northward, said Mike Bettwy, operations chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

“But tomorrow night into early Monday could be just as impressive as what we saw last night,” Bettwy said Saturday afternoon.

The phenomenon is the result of what’s called a coronal mass ejection, an eruption of plasma and magnetic field from the sun. When the material from that ejection reaches the outer layers of our atmosphere, it interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, Bettwy said.

“It’s that interaction with the magnetic field that actually causes that aurora to occur, and the stronger the storm then not only the stronger the intensity of the aurora and the duration, but also the more likely it is to go further south into lower latitudes,” he said.

The possibility of additional ejections will persist until a large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view, most likely by Tuesday, the Space Weather Prediction Center says.

“When that material impacts gases in our Earth's atmosphere, it causes those gases to glow,” Nichols said.

Saturday’s spectacle was remarkable for its scope. Amazingly, the Northern Lights were seen by viewers within the “very light polluted city of Chicago,” Nichols said.

“We had reports even down to 20 degrees of south latitude in Africa last night, and then of course all over Europe, and parts of Asia as well, so that widespread nature is quite unusual,” Bettwy said. “I would say it only happens every 20 to 30 years.”

Space weather experts say it’s really difficult to predict exactly when an aurora is going to peak over a specific area.

“The best advice I could probably give to folks is to just, if you can, try to set your alarm and go outside at a few different points in the night,” Bettwy said.

In other words, the display tends to ebb and flow. People can see a “big change in conditions” in a span of only 15 or 20 minutes, Bettwy said.

If you don't see anything with the naked eye, and you have an iPhone or an Android, snap a few pictures, Bettwy said, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

“In the dark, you may not see those colors as vibrantly as your camera does,” Nichols said.

And here’s another use for those solar eclipse glasses. Go outside, put on the glasses, and you might be able to make out at least part of one of the sunspots.

“If I'm allowed to use the term ‘Super Bowl,’ we had the Super Bowl of solar eclipses, and now we have the Super Bowl of space weather,” Nichols said.

The Northern Lights show the power of the interaction between the sun and the Earth, Nichols said.

“We are not isolated in our solar system by any stretch of the imagination,” she said, “and this should just be a reminder of that.”