Categories: Aurora

This is What Can Happen When a CME Hits Earth

This video taken by Göran Strand from Östersund, Sweden shows what happened on March 17, 2013 when a Coronal Mass Ejection hit Earth’s magnetic field. Two days earlier, sunspot AR1692 had produced a M1-class solar flare that resulted in the CME that hit Earth.

This time lapse from an all-sky camera captures the magnificent sky show between 19:20 and 23:35 UT on the 17th.

Strand said via email that this time lapse consists of 2464 raw images for a total data amount of 30Gb from the 17th. The stunning photo of the Sun is a hydrogen alpha mosaic he made from 10 images that was captured on March 16.

Beautiful!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Recent Posts

This is What it Sounds Like When the Earth’s Poles Flip

Is there something strange and alien confined deep inside the Earth? Is it trying to…

1 hour ago

Orbital Debris is Getting Out of Control

In 1978, NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais proposed a scenario where…

2 hours ago

Webb Reveals a Steam World Planet Orbiting a Red Dwarf

The JWST has found an exoplanet unlike any other. This unique world has an atmosphere…

4 hours ago

NASA Wants to Move Heavy Cargo on the Moon

While new rockets and human missions to the Moon are in the press, NASA is…

5 hours ago

Learning More About Supernovae Through Stardust

Dust grains older than the Sun can tell us about how supernovae enriched the cosmos…

6 hours ago

Astronomers Predict the Orbits of Potentially Hazardous Comets From Meteor Showers

Long-period comets can have orbits that can take hundreds of years before they return to…

8 hours ago