Aurora watching – frustration & fascination

At 9:30 last night I posted this on Facebook: “I should be watching a great display of the aurora borealis right now. The current report from The Geophysical Institute says so! But as usual, there’s nothing – it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a good display 🙁 Oh well, at least I’m not a tourist paying thousands of dollars to see a starry sky.”

Just before I went to bed there was a stable line of auroral light at tree-top height to the northeast, but it didn’t change in the 20 minutes or so I watched it. When I got up at 05:10 this morning, though, there was the display I had expected! It was directly overhead as forecast. Not a great show but certainly a very good one so we went to the hot tub and watched the show for another half an hour (it’s -35°C with a breeze, so a wind chill into the minus 40s).

Most of the display was wispy and very fast-moving – tough if not impossible to get a good photo of. Hopefully this is a sign of what’s ahead during the solar maximum next winter, though the NOAA forecast now calls for it to be of below average intensity. It has been forecast to be during the winter of 2011-2012, but NOAA now says that May 2013 will be the peak (and the aurora can’t be seen here in May because the sky doesn’t get dark enough).

I also saw several satellites this morning, which is unusual – I wonder if some get re-routed to study the aurora.