I'm disappointed I missed it, I had disabled my Aurora phone alert after it woke me up for a 1% chance of seeing it a few weeks ago. I saw a bit of light in SE Michigan at about 1:30 AM EST, but just a tinge of green.
The interesting technical angle here is how unprepared critical infrastructure still is for these events. GPS depends on ionospheric stability - when the ionosphere goes haywire, atmospheric refraction errors can accumulate to tens of meters in under an hour. That's enough to break precision agriculture systems, autonomous vehicle positioning, and financial trading systems that rely on atomic clock synchronization.
The 1859 Carrington Event wouldn't just take down power grids - it would destroy high-voltage transformer windings. Given the months-long lead times on transformer manufacturing now, a Carrington-class event today would mean multiyear regional blackouts, not hours. The infrastructure chain has become more fragile as we've optimized for just-in-time supply.
What's missing from most emergency plans is how interdependent these systems actually are. You lose GPS, which breaks real-time power grid management. Power grid failures propagate to water treatment facilities, hospitals, communications towers - and suddenly the warning systems themselves fail. It's a cascading failure problem that's rarely modeled comprehensively.
The X5 flares are a useful reminder that space weather is an asymmetric risk - low probability of civilization-scale disruption, but extremely high consequence. Yet we still don't have comprehensive real-time space weather monitoring or standardized protocols for graceful degradation across critical infrastructure domains.
Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning
11.11.2025 19:25 (PJM times are Eastern Standard).
PJM-RTO
A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued for 19:25 on 11.11.2025 through 04:00 on 11.12.2025 . A GMD warning of K7 or greater is in effect for this period.
This is only a warning. There are no listed actions being taken. When you see Geomagnetic Disturbance Action, not just Warning, there's a problem. That happened most recently on June 1, 2025.
Extra people are probably on standby all night in case something happens.
CAISO: Nothing.
ERCOT: Nothing.
Hydro-Québec: Multiple snow-related outages near Montreal and some other locations.
Background info from the last time HN got wound up about this.[1]
I saw this in the Denver area in Colorado, US an hour and a half ago. I looked up and couldn’t believe the sky was red. Took me a while to realize it was the aurora borealis. Very cool!
I know there are a lot of comments from people saying they’ve seen it, but as I understand it this solar flare won’t hit until 16h UTC, or about 12 hours from now, and there are two weaker flares hitting about now that are currently visible? Is that understanding correct?
Reports of seeing the aurora right now across North America down to the US/Mexico border. If that describes you and you're not under cloud cover (like I unfortunately am) I'd recommend going outside and finding somewhere dark with a clear view north.
Cell phone cameras see it better than people for whatever reason, so looking at it through your phone is an option.
I wonder why there doesn't seem to be any website with a map view of all of the planet's magnetometers. Looks like there should be more than enough data to make an interesting livemap.
Scotland, 56 degrees north - I was able to see the aurora through occasional gaps in fast moving clouds around 0400hrs. Red, easily visible to the naked eye.
Most of the time when someone says they are in the “North East of the UK” it’s not some Scotsman up in Shetland it is an English person who is currently in the North East of England.
The North East of England is in the middle part of the UK mainland.
"Most of the time when someone says they are in the “North East of the UK” it’s not some Scotsman up in Shetland it is an English person who is currently in the North East of England."
So .. they don't see scotland as part of the UK anyway? Why was it such an issue then that they wanted to leave? (And why were there bloody wars fought about it in the first place?)
Someone with a tiny little...um...axe to grind and not enough sense to take it someplace where people care. You can tell when they have to go back to Culloden to try and drag something up to wave around.
>G4 (Severe) Storm Levels Reached! published: Wednesday, November 12, 2025 01:40 UTC G4 (Severe) storm levels reached on 12 November at 0120 UTC (8:20pm EST)! Geomagnetic storm conditions are anticipated to continue into the night. Stay informed at spaceweather.gov for the latest. The included aurora images are of the aurora shining over northeastern Colorado.
We won't know any actionable detail till about 1 hour before it arrives at Earth. That's when interplanetary coronal mass ejections actually have their magnetic field orientation and intensity measured by ACE and other satellites far out at the L1 lagrange point: https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/ace-mag-swepam-24-hour...
If you see the red line on this plot^, the interplanetary magnetic field, be more than -10 nanotesla for about 4 hours then there's a good chance of lower than normal latitude aurora. Negative means the magnetic field is pointing downwards out of the ecliptic plane of the solar system and this is the most energetically favorable orientation for reconnecting CME magnetic field lines with Earth's magnetic field lines and letting solar particles/energy in.
It can be 20nT positive (upwards) magnetic field with intense density and high velocity but still be a non-event aurora-wise just because energy is delivered to the Earth's ring currents at 10x slower rate than if it's pointing downwards.
None of the WSA-ENLIL or related predictive models take into consideration the magnetic field orientation of iCMEs because it's really hard to know from remote observations. They can be thought of as warnings to pay attention to the ACE L1 measurements.
what effect if any will the solar flare emissions have on the new ish constellation style satellite networks? and or vice versa? EG would a shielded group or constellation provide a pathway for charge particles around the Earth?
I'm disappointed I missed it, I had disabled my Aurora phone alert after it woke me up for a 1% chance of seeing it a few weeks ago. I saw a bit of light in SE Michigan at about 1:30 AM EST, but just a tinge of green.
The interesting technical angle here is how unprepared critical infrastructure still is for these events. GPS depends on ionospheric stability - when the ionosphere goes haywire, atmospheric refraction errors can accumulate to tens of meters in under an hour. That's enough to break precision agriculture systems, autonomous vehicle positioning, and financial trading systems that rely on atomic clock synchronization.
The 1859 Carrington Event wouldn't just take down power grids - it would destroy high-voltage transformer windings. Given the months-long lead times on transformer manufacturing now, a Carrington-class event today would mean multiyear regional blackouts, not hours. The infrastructure chain has become more fragile as we've optimized for just-in-time supply.
What's missing from most emergency plans is how interdependent these systems actually are. You lose GPS, which breaks real-time power grid management. Power grid failures propagate to water treatment facilities, hospitals, communications towers - and suddenly the warning systems themselves fail. It's a cascading failure problem that's rarely modeled comprehensively.
The X5 flares are a useful reminder that space weather is an asymmetric risk - low probability of civilization-scale disruption, but extremely high consequence. Yet we still don't have comprehensive real-time space weather monitoring or standardized protocols for graceful degradation across critical infrastructure domains.
Another addition to Falsehoods programmers believe about time. A scary one.
US power grid info:
PJM:
A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued for 19:25 on 11.11.2025 through 04:00 on 11.12.2025 . A GMD warning of K7 or greater is in effect for this period.This is only a warning. There are no listed actions being taken. When you see Geomagnetic Disturbance Action, not just Warning, there's a problem. That happened most recently on June 1, 2025. Extra people are probably on standby all night in case something happens.
CAISO: Nothing.
ERCOT: Nothing.
Hydro-Québec: Multiple snow-related outages near Montreal and some other locations.
Background info from the last time HN got wound up about this.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44152154
I saw this in the Denver area in Colorado, US an hour and a half ago. I looked up and couldn’t believe the sky was red. Took me a while to realize it was the aurora borealis. Very cool!
15 min ago I saw it north from Denver - half of the sky was red.
Pics I took in Denver!
https://imgur.com/gallery/northern-lights-denver-zPF7PJC
Checking in from Littleton - saw it as well! My friend all the way from Grand Junction CO posted photos too
[1] is a real-time forecast for the auroral oval. See if you are in with a chance. Clear Skies!
[1] https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity/auroral...
They seem to be scraping the forecast images from https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-exper...
Hmm. It says my city has 0% chance of visibility but I'm looking at it outside right now.
Atlantic Canada is sorely underrepresented on the city charts, even though many locations would have amazing viewing.
I know there are a lot of comments from people saying they’ve seen it, but as I understand it this solar flare won’t hit until 16h UTC, or about 12 hours from now, and there are two weaker flares hitting about now that are currently visible? Is that understanding correct?
So - even bigger tomorrow? Tonight was pretty amazing.
Yes, and it's in the article.
Fully visible with naked eye in Kansas City. Beautiful magenta hues in the sky. My first time seeing an aurora in person.
I see it as well in southern KC. I've been to Alaska in the winter with hopes to the see the Northern Lights. Pretty awesome to see it this far south!
If you're in Chicagoland, was visible about 15m ago https://imgur.com/a/36cncec
Not so much now, but maybe it'll come back!
Down in northern Missouri too
Upstate South Carolina as well
Down in Victoria, Australia. Looks like the clouds should clear just in time for night fall and a decent show. Very cool.
This has a pretty good view of the aurora now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfF9bhaBuvw
That's really cool! But that's actually one of the previous CMEs, not this one. Very nice to see nonetheless.
Nice. Looks like it was peaking around 21:00 - 22:00 local time, got pretty intense for a while.
Reports of seeing the aurora right now across North America down to the US/Mexico border. If that describes you and you're not under cloud cover (like I unfortunately am) I'd recommend going outside and finding somewhere dark with a clear view north.
Cell phone cameras see it better than people for whatever reason, so looking at it through your phone is an option.
Request for "very low latitude" pictures from a researcher here: https://bsky.app/profile/vincentledvina.bsky.social/post/3m5...
Dad sent me a photo [1] from Alaska of the red light. He said they rarely get it "so far south" (he is in southern Alaska).
[1] (Not a great photo, but you get the idea.) https://imgur.com/a/TfkcbJQ
On the Kenai Peninsula? Great spot if so!
Yep, Homer.
You can see the real time magnetic field change when it hits: https://dasi.barlow.cpi.com/dashboard
This seems to be a distinct but similar magnetometer network, with global reach,
https://intermagnet.org/data_download.html
Example data, (Neumayer Station III in Antarctica)
https://imag-data.bgs.ac.uk/GIN_V1/GINForms2?observatoryIaga...
I wonder why there doesn't seem to be any website with a map view of all of the planet's magnetometers. Looks like there should be more than enough data to make an interesting livemap.
Here's a list of the sites,
https://www.gfz.de/en/section/geomagnetism/infrastructure/ge...
I can currently photograph this on my mobile phone in seattle from my backyard, good times!
Also: 100 % cloud cover in basically all of Northern Europe :/ Iceland is probably the place to be for the aurora show!
Scotland, 56 degrees north - I was able to see the aurora through occasional gaps in fast moving clouds around 0400hrs. Red, easily visible to the naked eye.
In northern Germany, it seems like clouds will clear up tomorrow night, when the CME arrives, according to meteoblue? I can only hope.
Yep. It's raining pretty hard here in the North East of the UK. Not much point in going to look.
Note to non-UK readers:
Most of the time when someone says they are in the “North East of the UK” it’s not some Scotsman up in Shetland it is an English person who is currently in the North East of England.
The North East of England is in the middle part of the UK mainland.
Similarly, the part of your body commonly referred to as “the bottom” is in fact closer to half-way down and not at the bottom at all.
I will leave any possible joke about being legless after a night out in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the experts.
"Most of the time when someone says they are in the “North East of the UK” it’s not some Scotsman up in Shetland it is an English person who is currently in the North East of England."
So you think this is simply wrong? (Like this)
So .. they don't see scotland as part of the UK anyway? Why was it such an issue then that they wanted to leave? (And why were there bloody wars fought about it in the first place?)
I think most people say "the North East" as a synecdoche for "the North East of England". the commenter being referred to likely just misspoke
Who wanted to leave? What wars?
Scotland the UK? (They were allowed to vote in the end and voted to remain)
And wars happened when scotland was forced to become part of the UK in medieval times. (Braveheart)
Someone with a tiny little...um...axe to grind and not enough sense to take it someplace where people care. You can tell when they have to go back to Culloden to try and drag something up to wave around.
Yep, clouds... clouds everywhere https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/maps-and-charts/cloud-cover...
It's raining off and on in London as well.
No sun ‘til next week :-(
"...geomagnetic storm watch for tomorrow as the cloud could impact our planet as early as 16 UTC on 12 November"
UK in November... It'll be raining again tomorrow.
Ah, but tonight it's raining protons
G4 reached...
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g4-severe-storm-levels-reache...
>G4 (Severe) Storm Levels Reached! published: Wednesday, November 12, 2025 01:40 UTC G4 (Severe) storm levels reached on 12 November at 0120 UTC (8:20pm EST)! Geomagnetic storm conditions are anticipated to continue into the night. Stay informed at spaceweather.gov for the latest. The included aurora images are of the aurora shining over northeastern Colorado.
Be aware that this is from a previous X flare, afaik
We won't know any actionable detail till about 1 hour before it arrives at Earth. That's when interplanetary coronal mass ejections actually have their magnetic field orientation and intensity measured by ACE and other satellites far out at the L1 lagrange point: https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/ace-mag-swepam-24-hour...
If you see the red line on this plot^, the interplanetary magnetic field, be more than -10 nanotesla for about 4 hours then there's a good chance of lower than normal latitude aurora. Negative means the magnetic field is pointing downwards out of the ecliptic plane of the solar system and this is the most energetically favorable orientation for reconnecting CME magnetic field lines with Earth's magnetic field lines and letting solar particles/energy in.
It can be 20nT positive (upwards) magnetic field with intense density and high velocity but still be a non-event aurora-wise just because energy is delivered to the Earth's ring currents at 10x slower rate than if it's pointing downwards.
None of the WSA-ENLIL or related predictive models take into consideration the magnetic field orientation of iCMEs because it's really hard to know from remote observations. They can be thought of as warnings to pay attention to the ACE L1 measurements.
Nice comment. Thanks for explaining
> could impact our planet as early as 16 UTC on 12 November
Is that 16:00 or 00:16?
16 hundred hours; 16:00. Since revised down to midday (12 UTC).
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/pad_sid...
Bad timing for North America Eastern TZ - day break here. Pacific/Mountain TZ should be fine.
In Rhode Island it seems like auroras practically guarantee overcast skies.
Update: tonight the sky is clear and the air is frigid. I guess this logically implies there won't be an aurora :)
ISO timestamps are the one true way:
2025-11-12T16Z
Billions of tonnes of matter ejected at millions of kph. It’s shame we can’t harness that energy.
The regular photons are a start
Perhaps we should start with more local less violent events like hurricanes and volcanic eruptions.
it would have to be quite the harness.
A severe geomagnetic storm is starting now (November 12 0000Z). But it's from the previous X-flares (X1.7 and X1.2), not the X5.1 flare.
From what I’ve read that could be bad, because prior flares can clear a path (through the solar wind) for later flares to move faster and hit harder.
G4 is happening now https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/alerts-watches-and-warnin...
cool super amazing
relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2233/
Carrington event 2.0?
Definitely no.
Are we doomed by the next Carrington Event?
Probably not.
https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/space-weather-and-c...
Possibly, but not from this event, it isn't nearly that strong.
That one was weak. Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event instead.
what effect if any will the solar flare emissions have on the new ish constellation style satellite networks? and or vice versa? EG would a shielded group or constellation provide a pathway for charge particles around the Earth?
looks like i'll be going out tonight
Could this destroy the ISS?
No, they'll just get a spectacular view of the aurora.
no