If you haven’t heard, the Sun’s surface erupted Sunday morning sending a a geyser of ionized atoms directly at Earth.

So once the tons of plasma from this massive solar flare enter our atmosphere it is expected to create a geomagnetic storm. Sounds scary, but unless you are a satellite you should be ok (at least this time around). The cool side-effect of this geomagnetic storm is that it should produce an aurora  that will be visible right here in the Midwest.

My friend Jason sent me a link tonight to let me know about it, and just a few minutes ago as I was crawling into bed I saw strange lights outside. I went out in the backyard and the whole sky was flickering bluish light.

Unfortunately it was really cloudy so I could not see the “ribbons” of green and red light I was expecting. But was amazed by it nonetheless at the light seemed to dance across the entire sky in all directions. Uh, and then I heard thunder and saw some cloud-to-cloud lightning, so I realized it was just a thunderstorm that happened to wrap itself around my house in all directions. While I do enjoy lightning storms and have been known to sit outside in the rain to watch a  good storm, I was really hoping to see a true cosmic tsunami.

I had seen a version of a Northern Lights aurora over Lake Michigan before and it was amazing.  I have always wanted to go to Canada or Alaska to take in a true aurora (see the photo with this post), but I would settle for seeing this geomagnetic storm right here in my backyard! I will be out tomorrow night in hopes to see it.

In case you are wondering what actually causes the light show:

When a coronal mass ejection reaches Earth, solar particles stream down our planet’s magnetic field lines toward the poles. In the process, the particles collide with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, which then glow, creating an effect similar to miniature neon signs.