Northern Lights

An article from the Anchorage Daily News

A big, bad sunspot has been blasting Earth with particles and protons off and on for weeks, making September the stormiest month on the sun's surface in more than 14 years, according to NASA scientists.
And all that magnetic zapping has produced some of the most visible summertime auroras in years, including skywide northern lights that awed Alaskans on Saturday night and produced red displays as far south as Arizona.
It's not over yet. Another big flare erupted from Sunspot 798 on Wednesday, sending a gusting magnetic cloud hurtling toward Earth at more than a million miles per hour.
"It is a fairly large geomagnetic storm that we've had over the past 24 hours, and it should continue a little while longer," said aurora researcher Dirk Lummerzheim, at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "I would venture to say that there's a good chance that the aurora will last until Friday."
When the storm spread over the poles early Thursday morning, it gave Alaskans the second shimmering green light show in a week.
A North Pole photographer who signed e-mail messages as "Santa" posted a dazzling picture of the display on the Geophysical Institute's online aurora forum, monitored by sky watchers across the globe, just before 4 a.m.
"They started up around midnight and have continued to display for the last three hours and 45 minutes," Santa wrote. "It quieted down, and I went home. It has picked up again, and the display is once again quite beautiful. ... Just too beat to go back out to continue shooting."
"Wow!" replied Alex, of Ottawa Valley in Canada. "Santa, when I look at your pictures, I am really thinking about relocation to Alaska."
Credit Sunspot 798.
Sunspots are planet-sized splotches formed by the sun's roiling magnetic field. For reasons that aren't well understood, their magnetic fields become unstable and explode, producing flares and propelling charged particles and radiation into space.
Let that tsunami of magnetic power slam into Earth, and it can produce a geomagnetic storm that makes regular daily auroral activity much more visible than usual. Such solar tantrums can also zap satellites, disrupt radio transmissions and expose airline passengers or astronauts to higher-than-normal levels of radiation.
Sunspot 798 first appeared in August, disappeared as the sun rotated, then rounded into view again on Sept. 7. It promptly blew up with the fourth largest flare measured since X-ray monitoring began in 1975.
Since then, the thing has exploded eight more times with X-class, or extreme, flares.
In a twist that has somewhat befuddled solar scientists, the sun is supposed to be in the quiet phase of its 11-year cycle, with sunspot activity close to minimum. It hasn't happened. The year has so far produced four severe geomagnetic storms and 15 extreme flares. That's similar to the action seen when the number of sunspots last peaked in 2000, according to NASA.
"The sunspots of 2005, while fewer, have done more than their share of exploding," said solar physicist David Hathaway, of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., in a press release.

Did any of you AK folk see this? This is awesome!

I'm not totally confident I understand all the scientific jargon, but I'm pretty sure we cannot credit sunspot 798.

Credit God.