Robert Ray, who lives in Eager, Arizona, said he dreamed of photographing the Northern Lights since he was a child, but he never imagined doing it for the first time from his backyard.
The lights were seen across Arizona on Sunday night, and people were taking pictures of them all the way from Flagstaff to South Tucson.
According to Kevin Strongman, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Tucson, this natural spectacle is due to geomagnetic storms, disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by clumps of plasma ejected from the sun’s corona. Happened.
Ray said he only plans to travel to Iceland, Canada, or Alaska to photograph the lights of his dreams, but he’s heard there’s a possibility of seeing the northern lights in Arizona on Sunday night. He set up his camera and waited patiently.
But he didn’t have much hope.
“Several times in the past, it was predicted that we might see an aurora, and each time I tried, but last night it wasn’t,” he said.
When she saw a rare phenomenon that finally revealed its red and pink colors in the late-night desert sky, Rei jumped up and squealed with joy.
“I was so excited to catch the Northern Lights,” he said. “They were very faint to the naked eye, but you could definitely tell they were there.”
Solar activity was particularly high Sunday night, according to space scientist Mark Miesch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. The planet’s K-index, which is used to measure geomagnetic activity on a scale of 1 to 9, peaked around 9:00 pm Sunday night at 8:00 pm and Monday morning at 6:00 am.
Sunday’s storm was a 4 out of 5 category, Misch said, with the light visible far to the south.
The Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded project based at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, also used one of its sky cameras to capture a time-lapse video of a rare event.
“Solar activity is intense enough to see the northern lights here in Tucson,” CSS posted on Twitter.
Arizona Weather:Monsoon and Storm Forecasts, Alerts, Phoenix and Statewide Warnings
Christopher Klein, assistant professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona, said he was surprised to see the northern lights on Sunday night. .
“We are entering a period of the solar cycle called the solar maximum,” Klein explained. “This happens every 11 years, which is relatively long in our time.”
The geomagnetic storm was expected to last through Monday night, but with the solar wind slowing, it’s unlikely we’ll see light again from Arizona, Miesch said.
“However, I would like to add that it is very likely that we will see more of these Level 4 storms in the next few years.
Misch explained that the cycle of solar activity will peak next year, so Arizona people are likely to have more opportunities to enjoy space weather shows like Sunday in the coming months.
