I got a good shot of the very rare white aurora

Attached File



some might say those are clouds but i say bullshit. It is white aurora!

X5.4 last night created a full halo CME and we just had another X Class just now. 6m and 2m AU may be open for a couple of days. I would expect some TEP may open. SFI is high enough for some F2 on 6M but not sure how that would work with the storm going on. We did have some brief F2 yesterday afternoon.

supposed to be somewhat clear tonight. Hopefully the aurora is good again. Want to check that one off my bucket list.

ETA: Bunch of guys last night on 6m ssb AU were saying they have never seen the conditions like this. That the last time they had a really good AU was back in the 60’s. This opening was much better. AU this morning was up and down but worked a couple of stations on 6m Q65. If you have not used Q65 its pretty good on AU, and tropo scatter. Great tool on 6M.

where are you getting the current flare detection from?

space weather live is delayed many hours


ETA: Nevermind, I see it on the chart.

SWPC and Solarham.com is what I check. If you watch the Goes Magnetometer you can see when the CME begin to impace.  Keep in mind every 3 hours NOAA resets the Geo Storm cumulative. So you will see it got to G1 every 3 hours, usually going right back up as they begin to average again. Kind of a weird system.

Didn't know that, was wondering why it kept cycling to G1, then G3, then G4 and 5.

lol  my aurora was similarly camouflaged
but i did work some station on 6cw. very cool

Solar events are updated every 5 minutes here: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-and-geophysical-event-reports

Never did clear up here. Maybe tonight.

Got on 40 CW for a bit last night, worked stations in MI and CT. Flutter was so bad we had to send ~8 WPM to understand each other.

Trying to do the SKCC Sprint this morning. Bands are all but dead, what sigs there are ~S1 and fluttering,

I looked at around 2 AM, 4 AM, and 5:30 AM, and saw nothing I could call aurora borealis. Of course I have idiot neighbors who have to run big lights on their yards all freaking night, so there was a fair amount of light pollution.

I have seen it in the Quebec sky some years ago.

Good policy.
All of my equipment is grounded through the station ground. Power comes in through UPS's which have their own surge protector as do the feedlines. I still disconnect the feedlines to the radios.

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

Currently at a G5. As far as I know, there has been no reporting of any significant events related to this CME but I put no faith in that due to the current level of so-called "reporting".

Unfortunately the highest rating is G5, there's nothing above that. It's likely the Carrington event was at least 1000 times more powerful than what we are seeing today. Since each level in the G scale represents a factor of 10, the Carrington event would be more like a G8 if there was such a thing.

Certainly we've all noticed that the HF bands are dead, dead, deadski. The only other major disruption I'm aware of is the GPS is having accuracy problems that are preventing WAAS LPV approaches to be conducted. Lateral navigation remains unaffected. However a large number of aviation GPS receivers are declaring solutions invalid. This is causing a lot of angst in the aviation world right now.

Indeed I am a 1 man show at work remoting into a large fleet of drones around the country to diagnose Hardware faults, C2 Link issues and install updates stuff like that. I had to ground the fleet last night, we gave the guys a heads up this was coming, but it hit a little sooner than expected. That magnetic pulse was massive as it passed the Goes Magnetometer. I started to type the message out and we went from G1 to G3 quickly giving them a heads up, halfway through the message we were at a G4. Gave the order to ground the fleet. We also experienced multiple GPS issues in AZ on Wednesday when the X class hit at 3pm Eastern. It was noon in AZ, 4 aircraft either lost a GPS fix lock or were unable to get a lock on a satellite on the ground. It lasted the duration of that flare. After the levels dropped GPS came right back. Kind of unusual so I suspect that it disrupted the Ionosphere enough that there was some sort of Scintillation issue causing multipath. Just a guess but to have 4 with the same issue in a geographical area screams environmental. These aircraft are using 2 of the best consumer-grade modules which are GNSS tri-band systems. They have amazing noise rejection and anti-jamming algorithms. We seldom have issues with them. They run Ublox F9p modules on a Canbus system.

Yeah gps was pretty wonky yesterday, good thing they have someone sitting there.

Thank you for clarifying that. I of course had to do a search, went down below the NPR article LOL, until I found any reference to the G5. Should have known better and read a little more. Thanks.

Not white.. just a crappy cellphone photo :)

Apparently not all major utilities are protected to the same levels, according to that most recent EMP Commission report. Interestingly, the NOAA Space Weather site was not just talking about power companies but that pipelines could also have issues. I guess I hadn't thought about that aspect.

As for consequences, the Great Texas Deep Freeze of 2021 caused numerous deaths due to power outages - "At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis.". Where I live, power was out for 3.5 days. In Virginia after Isabel in 2003, we were without power for 5.5 days. But that was obnoxious heat and humidity, not sub-zero temperatures.

I'm not sure anybody really knows how the protection that is currently in place will react to an event that is 10x-100x the 1989 event. One has to wonder given the possibility of cascade failures if one power company is a little lax, whether they'll take the rest down with them.

I gave some ops people a heads-up that GPS was going to likely have issues. I was hoping the folks down here at least would use their outdoor netted cage and do some tests to see how commercial drones would react to something like this. Alas, they weren't in a research-y mood. Too bad, it would have made a great technical paper (and probably some good videos, too).

Looks like everything is back to operational status: https://www.nstb.tc.faa.gov/realtime-plots.html

Thanks for the link to that. It may come in handy for pre-mission planning.

Solarham event timeline with pictures: LINK

Here we go again:

ETA:

Solarham LINK

This morning I watched the signals disappear as an X2.9 hit.  It's from a region just coming into view, so expect more crap conditions.  Just what I need as I head west and hope to get some new Asia DX.

we now have 2 Full halo CMEs headed our way.

one from 1836 UTC 14 may and one from 0924 UTC 15 may,  today

erupted 15 hours apart

So, I should expect the bands to suck for a couple of days, right?

@Emoto
Go to QRZ.com  
Check out the solar conditions banner. The best conditions are high solar flux numbers and low "A" and "K" indices. The lower left has band by band conditions divided into day and night predictions. The chart will also tell you about the activity level of the Geo-magnetic field. lower is better for HF radio.

Supposedly, 160M is not affected by sun spot activity but I'm not sure where I got that notion. The best time of the cycle for HF will be in the fall/ winter where the thunder storms are active in the southern hemisphere, the solar flux is high and the "A" and "K" indices are low. (Ideally a big fat zero.) HTH
73,
Rob