By Gus Saltonstall
The Northern Lights and New York City are not generally words included in the same sentence, but a powerful geomagnetic storm brought the celestial spectacle to the skies above the five boroughs on Thursday night, including on the Upper West Side.
“At about 10:15-10:30 p.m., my wife and I were able to plainly see the aurora even through the heavily light-polluted sky here on the UWS,” Gus Hobbs wrote in an email to West Side Rag. “My camera was able to pick up the colors more vividly, but the reds and greens were still weakly observable with the naked eye. Incredible!”
The technical term for the Northern Lights is aurora borealis, and there were reports of the colorful lights as far south as Washington D.C. and Kentucky.
The phenomenon was the result of a “fast coronal mass ejection” of plasma from the the sun on Tuesday night, which then traveled to earth at 1.5 million miles per hour, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.
As the New York Post reported, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday morning that it expected the aurora only to be visible in upstate New York and that the lights would not reach the city. Luckily for New Yorkers and Upper West Siders who were treated to the spectacle Thursday night, that prediction turned out to be wrong.
There is a chance that the lights will again be visible Friday night in New York City as the impacts from the solar storm continue to arrive on earth. While we know it is a little open ended, Fox 5 reports that the window for possibly seeing the aurora borealis on Friday would be between sunset and sunrise.
Good luck.
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In which part of the sky (which direction should I look) will this allegedly be visible?
North
oh good, I have a good N view! thanks!
Since the Northern Lights, by definition, are visible most frequently in the north, one would suspect that looking northward (uptown) might be a good idea.
“between sunset and sunrise” bahahaha. That really narrows it down.
Look north and have a look at the Aurora Forecast Map from NOAA to see if the colored lump is drifting down toward the northeast U.S. If not, then it’s unlikely we’ll see any more aurora Friday night.
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/aurora-forecast-northern-hemisphere.jpg
Thank you for this fantastic information!
The air isn’t heavily polluted here. You probably mean you saw them through the clouds!
The sky here is heavily “light polluted” as the article says.
Great show on Thursday night walking the dog in the museum park but only through my iPhone camera, I couldn’t see anything from the naked eye.