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We may have just witnessed some of the strongest auroras in 500 years "We'll be studying this event for years." The auroral displays that wowed observers around the world two weekends ago, including folks as far south as Florida in the U.S. and Ladakh in northern India, may have been among the strongest such light shows since record-keeping began. "With reports of auroras visible to as low as 26 degrees magnetic latitude, this recent storm may compete with some of the lowest-latitude aurora sightings on record over the past five centuries, though scientists are still assessing this ranking," NASA officials said in a statement. "It's a little hard to gauge storms over time because our technology is always changing," Delores Knipp, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who focuses on space weather, added in the same statement. "Aurora visibility is not the perfect measure, but it allows us to compare over centuries."

The idiots addicted to conspiracy theory nonsense instead of common sense and science blamed HAARP, an instrument to study the ionosphere, for the aurora, I kid you not! Saw the nonsense on Twitter and no doubt it was posted elsewhere too. HAARP was NOT in action the days of the huge aurora.

Today we can measure the speed and density of the solar wind, that is recent so comparing how far south, by magnetic latitudes, aurora have been spotted in the past is the only way, if not the best way, of judging the strength of an aurora.


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he vivid colors migrated toward the equator on May 10 because of a rare G5 geomagnetic storm unleashed by our hyperactive sun a few days prior, the strongest to hit our planet since Halloween of 2003. Between May 3 and May 9, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory cataloged 82 "notable" solar flares spawning from two active regions on the sun (3663 and 3664). These clusters of sunspots grew so complex that they erupted repeatedly during the week. Starting on May 7, at least seven coronal mass ejections, or CMES, charged toward Earth and began storming our planet on May 10, which was when the strongest auroras were seen.

The sunspots that caused the flares and CMEs that caused the superstrong aurora are now on a side of the sun not visible from Earth. But the robots on Mars are seeing the sunspots including the strongest flare yet, a superstrong flare!

https://www.space.com/solar-storms-may-2024-strongest-auroras-500-years