Look to the skies this weekend as solar storms strike Earth The US National Weather Service has issued a warning that a G4 solar storm will lash Earth from Friday until Sunday. The agency's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has been observing solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from a sunspot 16 times wider than our home world. Five of these CME-derived solar flares are …
Can't remember for which article El Reg provided this helpful graphic. (I live in the northeastern US, not much better overall in that regard...)
I'm gutted that my home city & Dartmoor gets the whole dancing lights treatment. while I 15 years in Canada at best has seen only a green wisp, green backlight clouds or as is the case tonight green light clouds only visible with a smartphone camera with slow explosure.
Hopefully no clouds tomorrow night.
All this whinging. Friday night was absolutely spectacular in the UK, sky was totally alive. I was out and there were the voices coming from almost every backyard of people being awed.
I’ve seen many spectacular meteor shows, comets and other things. Regular telescope user too. Urban light pollution and cold are far bigger problems than cloud cover.
https://www.facebook.com/share/CRBAnnifgZ26Qse6/
Apologies for the FB link. It was sent to me this morning. Have to fumigate the laptop now
Found non-FB link to the photographer, Marcin Jedrysiak
Interesting mention about the error problems, ECC would seem to mitigate this but most home users don't use it due to hardware requirements.
Of course if there is no power then memory corruption would seem to be a secondary concern.
The sort of event that might scramble even a regular DRAM chip through shielding and suchlike isn't normally a problem due to atmosphere,
normally you only see SEUs if radioactive materials have found their way into the packaging.
Most home users don't know ECC. But DDR5 mandates internal ECC, albeit the internal uses a bigger hamming to save ECC bits. Without it I suspect DDR5 could not be this cheap and fast since the internal ECC can hide some errors which else would crash your system. My DDR5 system will be real ECC, exposed to the CPU, just like my current AMD home-user-CPU system with DDR4-ECC.
... up in Whatcom County, Washington (just South of British Columbia). Everyone recommended a good spot along a county road with a wide open view to the North. Everyone there was staring intently to the North as the aurora appeared directly overhead. Maybe even a bit to the South.
Not wanting to put up with headlights along the road, I went home. The back yard was sufficiently dark to see and photograph it quite well.
I'm about the same latitude as Chicago. The whole sky was dancing! Not only were they visible to the north, but also straight up, to the west, to the east and even to the south! I've been north of the Arctic Circle before, this was way better than that - I can only imagine what it must have been like in those places.
Hopefully last night as is big as it gets, because I'd hate to hear about another Carrington Event. Especially because I'd probably hear about it a month later as I'd no longer have internet, TV, or electricity for that matter lol
We had clear sky over most of NZ and the lights really put on a show between about 5 and 9 pm
A collection of pictures on the local new site.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350275189/photos-aurora-lights-new-zealand-skies-after-space-storm
The pictures from any decent camera show a lot more light than the eye can detect. but it was certainly visible to the naked eye.
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