Amateur astronomers saw the aurora from the latitude of Moscow

It could be expected in the north of the Moscow region

A substorm and bright auroras were recorded on Monday evening in mid-latitudes. They were seen even from the latitude of Moscow! Observers posted on social networks photos of Aurora – the glow of the upper atmosphere, resulting from the interaction of the planet’s magnetosphere with charged particles of the solar wind.

According to IZMIRAN and spaceweather.com, a fairly noticeable medium-level flare (with a power of M4.6) occurred on the Sun on Sunday night. It was produced by one of the coronal holes. Despite the fact that it did not portend a strong magnetic storm on Earth, streams of high-energy charged particles could give birth to auroras.

As noted by AstroAlert, an information site for astronomers, on Monday, after 1 a.m., several observers immediately reported an aurora on the northern horizon. For example, one of the pictures was sent from the city of Irbit in the Sverdlovsk region, the second – from Tatarstan, a settlement located at the latitude of Moscow – 55 degrees north latitude.

As MK explained at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Radio Wave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences, unlike magnetic storms, which lead to rather strong disturbances, substorms are local in nature and cover mainly the night parts of the polar regions.

Substorms and their accompanying upper airglows can occur quite often in the circumpolar regions. Taking into account the fact of Sunday’s ejection of solar matter from the coronal hole, it can be assumed that by Monday it reached the Earth and caused a disturbance in the Earth’s geomagnetic field, accompanied by aurora. It could well be observed from the north of Tatarstan or from the Sverdlovsk region. With an extreme stretch, one could expect it in the north of the Moscow region – scientists estimated this possibility on Monday at 3-5% (after all, the geomagnetic disturbance was not strong), but even if it were, it would be hidden from Muscovites and residents of the Moscow region, the cloudiness that is now present over our region.

Meanwhile. According to the information site of observational astronomy, by the evening of Monday, January 16, a new giant sunspot appeared on the visible side of the Sun’s disk. Its diameter is 50,000 kilometers, which is 4 times (!) More than the Earth. It is expected that the group of spots #3190, which includes this solar “formation”, will appear on the central meridian of our star in 4 days and will be directed directly to our planet! If the complex magnetic structure of this group of sunspots persists or intensifies until January 20, then we can get quite a flare with an ejection in our direction. And that means the aurora season is just beginning.

Even now, experts warn, this spot can be seen even without optical instruments, but not without solar filters.