The Northern Lights are visible in the Bay Area just north of Napa
ST. HELENA, Calif. — The North Bay had a “total light show” on Thursday night. A KTVU camera caught a geomagnetic storm, which is an astronomical event. The Northern Lights are the more popular name for the bright aurora caused by the storm.
When our shooter, Jaden Schaul, set up near St. Helena, the sky was a beautiful shade of blue and purple. He said on social media that the lights could be seen with the naked eye. He put up pictures as early as 7:30 p.m.
Someone else posted a picture of the lights from the Sierra Foothills about thirty minutes later. Schaul said that by 10 p.m., the aurora was in “full display” from where he was standing. He shared a beautiful picture of a sky that was bright purple and full of stars.
Photos of the Northern Lights were all over social media, and most of them were from people on the East Coast.
The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Centre sent out a warning saying that the aurora might be visible at high latitudes, as well as in the northern U.S., in places like Michigan and Maine. Parts of Northern California were added to that prediction.
This growth happened because the solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) got stronger. In other words, the conditions were right for the G4 level storm to keep going into the night.
NOAA has a rating for geomagnetic storms that goes from G1 (not very bad) to G5 (very bad). A storm with a G4 strength is very bad.
NOAA says that solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) send about a billion tonnes of plasma from the sun to Earth, along with its magnetic field.
A geomagnetic storm could happen when that stuff from space hits Earth.
