The Mystery of Orange Auroras

Posted: March 5, 2022 by oldbrew in atmosphere, solar system dynamics
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Why now, we may ask. Either we didn’t notice them before or they weren’t there.

Spaceweather.com

March 4, 2022: A recent display of auroras over Canada has experts scratching their heads. The mystery? They were orange. Pilot Matt Melnyk was flying 36,000 feet over Canada on Feb. 23rd when he saw the strangely-colored lights from the cockpit window:

“I have been chasing and photographing auroras for more than 13 years (often from airplanes) and this is the first time I have ever seen orange,” says Melnyk.

What’s so strange about orange? Joe Minow of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center explains: “Theoretically, nitrogen and oxygen (N2, N2+, and O2+) can produce emissions at orange wavelengths, but these are typically weak compared to stronger emissions from the same molecules at the red end of the spectrum. It is hard to understand how orange could dominate in an auroral display.”

Even so, Melnyk says “these appeared to be real auroras.” The orange fringe danced in sync with regular red…

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Comments
  1. JB says:

    “Have you observed orange auroras?”

    Have you ever observed eyes that were not naked?

  2. oldbrew says:

    Noctilucent Clouds – by spaceweather.com

    The southern season for noctilucent clouds is over. It ended on Feb. 20, 2022, concluding the weakest NLC season in 14 years.

  3. oldbrew says:

    Now it’s ‘pulsating auroras’…

    ROCKET LAUNCH INTO PULSATING AURORAS: Sometimes, Arctic auroras do something strange and puzzling. They blink. Imagine a chess board where the squares strobe–green, black, green, black–in a mesmerizing rhythm every ~10 seconds. Researchers call them “pulsating auroras” and, over the weekend, NASA launched a rocket from Alaska to investigate.
    . . .
    “We still have a lot to learn,” says [NASA’s] Halford. For instance, patches of light within pulsating auroras can maintain almost exactly the same shape from pulse to pulse. Why? No one knows. Also, the pulses flicker as often as 10 times a second, a rapidfire modulation that has no easy explanation.

    https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=08&month=03&year=2022

  4. Gamecock says:

    The orange areas are at ground level or slightly above. Other phenomena could produce the orange light. I.e., I’m not convinced the orange part is aurora.

    Note that some of the lights in the lower right foreground are orangish, suggesting that atmospheric conditions could be producing the orange.