KUSA – If you were far enough away from the lights of a city, the spectacular Northern Lights were visible in the Colorado sky Monday night.
The Director of the Fiske Planetarium says a big solar storm allowed particles to shoot through space to the Earth's atmosphere and made it glow.
"And that's what causes the Northern Lights, this solar storm was so strong that the glow spread from where it's seen almost every night up in Canada, all the way down almost to Boulder," said Astrophysicist Doug Duncan.
Normally the Northern Lights are only seen a few times in Colorado in 10 years. Stargazers need to look toward the northern horizon, and get away from the cities to see it.
"If you have a nice digital camera and you set it on a tripod, and take a time exposure of one to five seconds, your camera can actually see better at night than you can," said Duncan. "And so the pictures of the Northern Lights look really spectacular on a digital image."
The solar storm which produced the glow last night has quieted down, so stargazers in Colorado are not likely to see the Northern Lights Tuesday night.
But Doug Biesecker, a scientist with NOAA, says another solar storm has happened and should arrive Wednesday night. That increases the likelihood that we could see the Northern Lights again, Wednesday into Thursday.
You can learn more about the Northern Lights by visiting Duncan's web site : http://bit.ly/1HcvcEB
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