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What type of camera do you have?

Pretty impressive how skillfully it managed to start fizzling as soon as the sun set. Best photo I could manage from tonight with frozen hands and 300mph wind.

Wow, that's really great. I've kinda fallen out of photography so I'm not too up to date with the extent of the improvements. Being able to take shorter exposures would really come in handy tonight. My hands are like ice and I have to hold the shutter down because I don't have a cable release thingy.

It'll matter in about an hour. The satellite that measures the data is way out there.

ok very bright

Clearing out a bit. Very noticeable glow out there now and it's much higher in the sky-- promising.

What you can get away with for ISO settings totally depends on your camera. If you've got noise, it's set too high. My camera is over a decade old and has horrible noise above ISO 200. New cameras supposedly maintain decent quality and go up to 1600 or even 3200. Secret tip: Leave your camera outside. Excessive grain/noise issues can be caused by heat on your cameras sensor, so keeping it cold makes a big difference. You can really see this in action if you look at dendrites webcam in the winter vs summer.

http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/ace-mag-swepam-6-hour.gif http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind

A few more from that night.

I picked this up as a hobby from 2001-2003... you could see the lights about 1-2 times per month... the sun was just completely unhinged those years. Not much money to be made from small, grainy images. Would be nice though!

I cry every time I think about losing the larger originals of these.

Reds and violets are visible from the darkest locations in the strongest storms. Cameras will pick reds up easily, but the human eye won't. Most photos are long exposed and exaggerated in that sense, but the one you posted is probably very close to accurate. I've only seen reds and violets twice.

Like you said, we're waiting for a substorm. Even with the 6 hours of Kp 9 in 2003, the actual show lasted maybe an hour before reverting to the bland green arc along the horizon.

Bz is measured a million miles out in space at the L1 point, and Kp is derived from how disturbed a global network of ground level magnetometers are. A lower Bz will allow a greater disruption of the earths magnetic field and the Kp will rise as a result.

Still, it's good enough to go back to a Kp of 8 apparently.

Things holding steady in meh territory. Took a photo of the west through a hole in the clouds, about 45 degrees above the horizon, and it's violet. There is likely a greenish arc lower on the northern horizon hidden behind the squalls. Damn squalls are 10 miles away and I'm getting wind blown snow from them.

It's basically the aurora light switch. If the value is north (positive) nobody sees anything except santa.

That period of higher density and lower Bz from an hour ago should be here by now. Too bad these troll squalls won't leave me alone.

God damn Bz trying to pull its usual well timed flip. Maybe it'll level out.

Density is going back up. Everything looks primed for a big show well down into the mid atlantic.

That not-so-perfect period a few hours ago led to the slight kp drop. Bt is climbing and Bz is dropping. Looks really good. Wouldn't be surprised if it went back to 8, just need the density to stop dropping.

I know trees... the bark is smooth and flawless and shows no evidence of cracking or being bent... the odds of it splitting or pulling apart and then magically sealing back up around the hose with no obvious stress fractures are pretty much zero. The hose would prevent the crack from being able to close back up so tightly.

lol... that hose wouldn't have gone through the tree unless fired out of the large hadron collider. I've seen more than enough ropes, vines and other objects embedded in trees to know what it looks like. The bark is unblemished and the hose is pinched tight... it's probably been there for many years. The rope I tied to a small maple tree to hang a bird feeder way back in middle school is now fully engulfed and up probably 30 feet.

Correct and incorrect... the brick red in the key isn't even sorta close to being the same color shown in the map. You can use the color identifier in any image editor to verify the difference. It's because they made the colors on the map somewhat transparent so you can see the streets underneath, which is why they're not as dark.