Clouds will make it hard to see Northern Lights
Cloudy skies may obscure the Northern Lights in Boston and parts of New England Thursday night, and viewers will have to find a clear, dark sky away from city lights to have any chance of seeing them, according to researchers and meteorologists.
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine are among 17 states where the Alaskan Geophysical Institute has predicted a solar storm will make the Northern Lights visible on Thursday. Sadly, the Boston area is expected to be mostly cloudy that night.
“Our forecast does unfortunately look really cloudy Thursday night,” said Maura Casey, the lead meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Gray-Portland office.
The Northern Lights, also known as the aurora borealis, occur when energetic particles from the sun in the solar wind interact with Earth’s atmosphere, causing light to emerge. During severe solar storms, the aurora reaches farther south than Alaska, Canada, or Scandinavia.
For the best viewing of the colorful show, it’s best to leave the city lights for clearer skies, said Caity Sullivan, an educator at Boston’s Museum of Science’s Charles Hayden Planetarium.
Lucas Guliano, a scientist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian, said the best time to view the lights will be between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Although their name suggests looking to the north, the lights can be spotted in any direction, he said.
The sun rotates on an axis about every 27 days, so an active region that caused an aurora might lead to another 27 days later, which is how the Alaskan Geophysical Institute can attempt to predict when and where auroras will occur.
The aurora’s strength is measured on a scale of zero to nine, called a Kp-index. The higher the number, the more bright and active the lights are expected to be. Thursday had been rated a six, but on Tuesday was lowered to four.
That would mean “it is very unlikely that any Northern Lights will be visible in the lower US states,” Guliano said.
Before the downgraded forecast, the lights were expected to be visible in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Indiana, and Maryland.
But the aurora will make another appearance in New England next year, when an 11-year solar cycle is expected to peak, Sullivan said.
“If you can see them, definitely go out and check it out,” Sullivan said. “They are incredible and very colorful.”