I'm an award-winning journalist writing about the night sky and eclipses.
Many people in locations as unlikely as Arizona, California, Florida, the Bahamas and Mexico got to witness skies lit up by purples, blues and greens as the northern lights became visible across North America on Friday and Saturday.
They appeared in the wake of multiple coronal mass ejections from the sun, which sparked a very strong geomagnetic storm around the Earth.This is what was seen on Friday, May 10 by the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory , a project between ESA and NASA to study the sun's outer corona and the solar wind. It orbits the sun from about 932,000 miles away from Earth. The bright spots either side are Jupiter and Venus.
Here’s a video of the solar flares captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observed 82 solar flares from May 3 through May 9. They came largely from two active sunspot regions called AR 13663 and AR 13664. Nine were categorized as X-class solar flares.2024. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares created from a mixture of SDO’s AIA 193, 171 and 131 channels.
The International Space Station—which orbits the planet from around 250 miles up—often gets to see the aurora as it glides across the planet's polar regions as it buzzes around the planet every 90 minutes or so.NASA Astronaut and astrophotographer Don Petit, a few days each year the ISS orbits Earth aligned with the terminator that divides from day and night on Earth.
That means it doesn’t get dark for a few days—making astrophotography very difficult. It just so happened to coincide with the strong geomagnetic storm around the Earth.NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System satellites also captured images of the aurora on May 11. A total of five JPSS satellites orbit Earth from pole to pole and cross the equator about 14 times each day, giving a full image of the planet twice each day.
NOAA-20 Joint Polar Satellite System International Space Station Solar Superstorm' Photos: See Last Weekend
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