There’s something undeniably magical about the idea of looking up and finding the sky glowing green, pink or even purple. And New England skygazers have a chance to see the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, put on a show across the region on Wednesday night.
When trying to catch a glimpse of the aurora this far south, it’s always up to a combination of science, timing and luck. You need the right burst of space weather, enough geomagnetic energy reaching Earth and, just as importantly, a clear sky and enough darkness to actually see it.
So what exactly are the northern lights?
The aurora borealis is the visible result of charged particles from the sun slamming into Earth’s upper atmosphere. The sun is constantly sending energy and particles outward in the solar wind, but from time to time, it sends out a stronger burst. When those particles arrive at Earth, our planet’s magnetic field channels them toward the polar regions. Once there, they collide with oxygen and nitrogen high in the atmosphere, and those collisions produce light.
That light can appear as curtains, rays, arcs or a diffuse glow. Green is the most common color because of excited oxygen atoms, but reds, purples and pinks can show up, too, depending on altitude and which atmospheric gases are involved.
In other words, the northern lights are really Earth’s atmosphere lighting up in response to energy from the sun.
For New England, that usually means the best chance of seeing the aurora comes when geomagnetic activity becomes strong enough to shove the auroral oval farther south than usual. Northern New England naturally has the best odds, but on stronger nights, the glow can become visible much farther south, especially away from city lights and with a clear northern horizon.
The Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a G2, or moderate geomagnetic storm watch for Wednesday into Thursday as a coronal mass ejection is expected to affect Earth.
One of the more interesting parts of aurora viewing now is that your phone may pick it up better than your eyes. In low light, our eyes often struggle to detect faint color, so the aurora can look like a dim gray or milky glow. But modern phone cameras, especially in night mode, can gather more light over a few seconds and reveal greens and pinks that may not look nearly as vivid to the naked eye.
Of course, perhaps the biggest deciding factor in any aurora setup is whether the clouds cooperate. Some clouds are expected to increase into the evening across far western and northern New England. Outside of those areas, you should still have a good window for viewing if the aurora materializes.
Get the latest updates on the free 1DegreeOutside mobile app. If there are reports of the northern lights in New England, you’ll get a push notification.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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