As the sun nears its peak in cycle 25, giant sunspots drive a major burst of auroral activity. “We have a very rare event on our hand,” Shawn Dahl, Service Coordinator of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Group, told reporters on Friday (May 10) just hours before the northern lights spectacle began.
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Many people around the world have just seen auroras for the first time in their lives. This includes residents of the Florida Keys, says Spaceweather.com.
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Seeing auroras in the Florida Keys is extraordinary, but the light show didn’t stop there. Sky watchers saw the sky turn red across the Carribean.
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“The last events on record when auroras were seen from Puerto Rico were in 1859 and 1921, so tonight was an historic event”, says Eddie Irizarry from the Sociedad de Astronomia del Caribe (Astronomical Society of the Caribbean).
Auroras also appeared in Mexico.
Source including aurora images here.
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Image: Auroral activity seen from North Wales (UK), 10 May 2024 [credit: M.Robinson]
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
well blow me over! …. been outside a lot this while ….. saw nothing. Getting around to thinking it’s another hashtag “me too” or covid moment. ( and I DO KNOW what an aurora LOOKS & SOUNDS like.)
Couldn’t see anything in Dundee but took a photo in my phone with lowlight mode and it’s vaguely visible. Too much light pollution sadly.
The sun has produced strong solar flares since Wednesday, resulting in at least seven outbursts of plasma. Each eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection, can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.
The flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that is 16 times the diameter of Earth, NOAA said. It is all part of the solar activity ramping up as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle. [bold added]
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-solar-storm-brilliant-globe-problems.html
For context, the radius of Jupiter is about 11 times that of Earth.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html
https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=09&month=05&year=2024
The lights were well on display in northern England, who needs to go to Greenland when you have sunspot AR3664?