The Northern Lights Should Appear More Often as Solar Cycle Peaks

(KNSI) – The skies above Minnesota were dancing Monday night with the Northern Lights. If you missed them, you will have plenty of other opportunities in the coming months and even years.

St. Cloud State University Associate Professor Rachel Humphrey says we won’t hit the peak of our current solar cycle until 2024. “The sun goes through certain cycles of these, you know, periods where it’s more active and periods where it’s less active. And, right now, we are in a pretty active period for the sun. I believe that it reaches its peak next year.”

Humphrey says astronomers and meteorologists look at sunspots and other signals to gauge the sun’s activity. The more gas emissions and other energy particles, the more opportunities for that radiation to make its way to our atmosphere.

The earth naturally deflects that towards the poles as a kind of defense mechanism. During intense solar storms, the reaction between those geomagnetic particles and the atmosphere is visible further south than normal, giving us the Northern Lights.

The other main factor, according to Humphrey, is the time of year. “As we start moving towards late fall and winter, we know that our nights get longer. It might make it a little less comfortable to stand out there watching those Northern Lights, but those long nights really do make for better viewing conditions.”

If you find yourself searching the sky during the next solar storm, make sure you have a quality camera on hand. Sometimes, what appears faint to the human eye can show up spectacularly on film.

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