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Northern Lights

We have had quite an eventful night-time display since I last wrote. Perhaps the most spectacular was Friday 10^th May towards midnight. I thought we may be able to see a small showing of the Northern Lights but when my phone app sent me an alert a day before, it was off the scale! Nothing prepared me for the display.

Our Sun has an activity cycle of about 11 years and the peak is not until next year! Neverthless, a solar storm shot out a huge bubble of plasma. The link shows NASA’s view of the Sun at that moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuBa3TUND9E

The small particles and energy which had travelled 96 million miles from the Sun eventually reached us after about 2 days. Because we have a magnetic field and different gases in our atmosphere, the charged particles bumped into these causing a wonderful light show. Green (Oxygen), Purple (a mix of Nitrogen and Oxygen), Red (high altitude Oxygen).

If you had looked up that night you may have mistaken it for a fuzzy cloud but after taking a picture through a mobile or camera it would be unmistakeable. Our eyes are not as sensitive to some wavelengths of light and also we can set a camera to gather in more light by altering the exposure length.

Athough the charts below are for September 3^rd at 10pm they also are correct for 9pm later on in this month.

 Looking North

Looking low in the north this month you will see The Plough and above that the smaller version (Ursa Minor) with its tail firmly pinned to the North Star (Polaris). Almost overhead at the moment is the North American Nebula marked in green on the diagram. Here is a close up view.

Shaped like the the North American outline it covers more than ten times the area of a full moon but is very faint. I overlaid 11 pictures here, each one with the camera taking 5 minute exposures. In other words 3300 seconds worth of light so I was able to see it. The part which looks like Mexico and Central America is called the Cygnus Wall. This has the most concentrated area of star formation. The whole area shines as it does because of the effect of a close-by star charging up the surrounding gas.

Looking South

I have placed an imaginary red curve that represents the ecliptic. This is a path that the sun, moon and planets appear to follow as seen from Earth. If you follow the curve to the left you will find Saturn. On the 8^th September, it will be closest to Earth and a good time to view it.

Saturn is on the same side of the sun to us and therefore much closer. Currently, the rings are almost edge on and this happens every 15 years, so it will almost appear as a line.

Even with a small telescope you will be able its largest moon Titan close by. The large square shape of Pegasus is slightly higher and to the left.

This year we have 3 supermoons and on 18^th September we will have the first of these. Not only that we have a partial lunar eclipse (8%) at 3.44am where the Earth’s shadow will fall onto the moon’s surface.

On the 23^rd of September look out for the moon, because just below is Jupiter.

Clear skies.
Milan Davidovic