Valentine's Day Aurora and Light Pillars

And maybe more coming soon!

Feb 15, 2023

The night sky over Fairbanks erupted in green beauty last night! The aurora was out almost the moment it became dark and danced through the entire night. The display was due to a G1 geomagnetic storm resulting from a small coronal mass ejection on February 11. While this CME only glanced Earth’s magnetic field, another CME is inbound and due for a direct hit on the afternoon of February 17. It will be an excellent time to look for aurora in all the usual places and maybe down into the lower 48!

Light Pillars

Last week as I was leaving work, I walked outside to find one of the most fantastic light pillar displays I have ever seen. They were fairly localized; you could see over town where a significant amount of ice was hanging in the air. Light pillars form when many hexagonal plate-like ice crystals are in very calm air. When the atmosphere is calm, the plates align uniformly with the flat face down, allowing bright light sources to reflect off them. This creates a virtual image of a pillar of light extending high above the source light viewed by distant observers.