Chippewa Falls freelance photographer Tony Wilder captured the northern lights over Lake Wissota last night. The solar flare activity causing the northern lights is expected to continue tonight.
A small solar flare erupted from the sun early Sunday, shooting out a burst of plasma like milk blown through a straw at 2.5 million miles an hour.
Headed toward Earth, the solar activity - called a coronal mass ejection - created a beautiful aurora borealis Tuesday night and Wednesday morning captured by photographers in northern Wisconsin and elsewhere on the planet. Conditions are ripe for a repeat of the show the rest of this week.
If you live in southern Wisconsin, you'll need conditions to cooperate to get a look at the aurora borealis. The best viewing requires clear skies.
In Chippewa Falls, freelance photographer Tony Wilder grabbed his camera and tripod and headed out around 11 p.m. Tuesday.
"You could definitely see the bright green," Wilder said. "You drive along the highway, you could see this bright green halo to the north. We had cloud cover but it didn't matter. It kind of silhouetted the clouds pretty nicely."
The small solar flare erupted at 3 a.m. Sunday, ejecting an outflow of plasma through the solar corona, the extended outer atmosphere of the sun. When hitting Earth, the plasma can produce significant geomagnetic storms, according to the National Weather Service. The coronal mass ejection was recorded arriving at 11:41 a.m. Tuesday, inciting a small geomagnetic storm.
At the National Weather Service office in Sullivan, a staff member monitored a site detecting flare activity Wednesday that showed the skies were very active, but unfortunately nothing could be seen during the daytime, said Jeff Craven, science and operations officer at the office.
Mark Hobson searched the skies over Madison Tuesday night in vain - it was too hazy.
"You want a pretty darn dark sky," said Hobson, public information coordinator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center. "As long as the solar flare activities continue, that will spark higher aurora borealis activity."
Though binoculars or telescopes can be used to see them, the naked eye is the best way to gaze at northern lights because they're typically so large they fill the night skies, said Rich Talcott, senior editor at Astronomy magazine, published in Waukesha.
While solar flares are not rare, what's unusual about this week's solar activity is that nary a peep has come from the sun recently.
"These tend to happen when the sun is active," said Talcott. "We haven't seen much of the flares or coronal mass ejections in the last couple of years."