Red alert cancelled. Red alert: aurora likely. Issued 2016-08-23 13:25 UTC (14:25 BST) by AuroraWatch UK using SAMNET LAN2 data from Lancaster, UK. AuroraWatch UK issued a red alert at 14:25 (BST) today based on magnetic field data from the LAN2 (Lancaster) magnetometer. Unfortunately, the readings were spurious and not related to geomagnetic activity. It,…
The AuroraWatch UK team are happy to announce that our updated website is now live! We have made many changes, some small and some major, some visual and some hidden behind the scenes. We hope all of these changes will produce a more reliable alerts system with better accessibility for all users and devices. One…
A few of our followers have reported that they don’t always see our Facebook posts very promptly (in fact, sometimes they may appear a day late!). So here’s how to ensure you never miss one of our Facebook posts. Updated: 08/03/2017 – new layout introduced Go to the AuroraWatch UK Facebook page in a web…
Following on from that missed event, we have been working on a few changes to our alert system to hopefully improve our alert level accuracy. Whilst some of those changes are still being worked on and tested, today we made the switch to using data from our Aberdeen (Crooktree) magnetometer, rather than our Lancaster magnetometer,…
At AuroraWatch UK we’ve always enjoyed looking at your photos of the aurora but, up until now, we’ve never captured any of our own. Today, however, we have some exciting news to share: AuroraWatch UK is getting its own aurora camera! Thanks to funding from Lancaster University’s Faculty of Science and Technology, the AWUK team…
One of the most frequent questions we receive on Facebook is: is this a photo of the aurora? So in this blog post, we’re going to list a few questions that you should ask yourself to help determine if you’ve snapped a photo of the aurora. Q1: What does AuroraWatch UK say? Although not perfect,…
As followers of AuroraWatch UK will undoubtedly be aware, last night was a pretty good night for seeing the aurora from across the UK. As shown in Figure 1, enhanced solar wind speeds, reaching 600 km/s at their peak, were recorded and were the result of a coronal hole high speed stream (you may see…
Nathan Case, Lancaster University People in the polar regions of the world, such as Scandinavia and Canada, sometimes get to watch majestic, rainbow-coloured clouds drift across an otherwise grey winter sky. Over the past few days, observers from across the UK and Ireland have also been lucky enough to witness this phenomenon, known as “nacreous”…
Nathan Case, Lancaster University Witnessing an aurora first-hand is a truly awe-inspiring experience. The natural beauty of the northern or southern lights captures the public imagination unlike any other aspect of space weather. But auroras aren’t unique to Earth and can be seen on several other planets in our solar system. An aurora is the…
Sarah Badman, Lancaster University Observatories on Earth are cheaper than telescopes in space. They are also improving rapidly – when the European-Extremely Large Telescope starts its observations in nine years, it will be able to provide images 16 times sharper than those taken by the Hubble space telescope. But while it may seem hard to…
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