Aurora lights up skies amid solar storm

Americans as far south as Alabama and Northern California could be treated to a show of the northern lights this weekend from a powerful geomagnetic storm heading toward Earth, officials said.

the Aurora lights now you’re seeing what the sky is looking like tonight in the United Kingdom it is magical to see we also got images coming in from Scotland now partially this is happening because of the earth and what it’s experienced right now we’re at a rare extreme level with the G5 geomagnetic solar storm so we need to break that down a little bit more let’s let’s get an expert in here because we are not that person Jeff Ray is what what’s happening Jeff explain this do you guys still have your glasses from when you were looking at the eclipse I do so tomorrow use them and look at the Sun and you’re going to be able to see what’s going on because it’s from a cluster of sunspots that’s on the surface of the Sun now this is a live shot or reasonable live I think they updated every 10 minutes of the sun currently NASA takes and it’s this region right here that where you’ll see this cluster that’s about 19 times the diameter of the Earth by the way and from that from that spot where where the sun spots are we’re at the near the height of the solar cycle it’s about every 11e cycle but at the heart of that there is going to be these huge coronal mass injections and there’s been several of them of the last week in fact we just had one yesterday and it’s from there this plasma goes ejecting out through space and interacts with our geomagnetic field over the planet so let me take show you this map now if you want to see this you’re probably going to have to head north because that blue line would represent you might see it at the horizon and everything in that green area that’s where you actually have the chance to see one of the better northern light shows in history you can see Clear Skies over parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas but the real clear skies are where you go further north and have a much better chance by the way of seeing this