{"id":9663,"date":"2025-11-12T16:46:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T16:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/?p=9663"},"modified":"2025-11-12T16:46:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T16:46:13","slug":"my-second-aurora-and-a-space-weather-alert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/my-second-aurora-and-a-space-weather-alert\/","title":{"rendered":"My Second Aurora, and a Space Weather Alert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"G4<\/a>
G4 conditions alert from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. (November 12, 2025)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I have now seen aurora two times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first was when my folks and I were living at 818 in Moorhead, Minnesota. I remember standing in the front yard, looking straight up, seeing pale greenish patches shifting. It looked a bit like drifting fog or blowing snow would, looking at a car’s headlights; but with no headlights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s as lyrically descriptive as I’ll try today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, yesterday evening (Tuesday, November 11, 2025), our third-oldest daughter came to my desk and told me that I should see the aurora. So did our son, as I was heading for the front door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier, while our oldest daughter and I were doing our usual chat, she texted ‘aura alert! brb’. Later, we discussed the difficulty of seeing aurora with eyes that detect colors quite well in daylight: but are distinctly sub-par at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, I lurched out the front door, hung onto one of the porch’s pillars, raised the other arm to block street lights, and enjoyed watching a wavering patch of indistinct red light. Mostly it was in the west-northwest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My son told me there was more overhead. I believe him, but getting myself down to ground level would have been more work than \u2014 well, basically, I enjoyed what I could see and was thankful for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m told that our son-in-law got some photos. He’s got a device that’s good in low light levels, and a very steady hand. I’ll probably see those, next time we get together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That “SEVERE Geomagnetic Storm ALERT” from the Space Weather Prediction Center is the sort of thing that’d have been science fiction in my youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days, for folks like me, it’s mainly a ‘heads up’, letting me know there’s a chance to see a light show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For others, who take care of today’s continent-spanning power grids and those parts of our infrastructure which orbit Earth, it signals that it’s time to use procedures developed for such circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s more to say about aurora, physics, science, being human, and God. But I’ve talked about that before:<\/p>\n\n\n\n