Northern lights everywhere! The night shone so beautifully

Berlin – Did you marvel at the big show in the sky last night instead of sleeping? Beautiful northern lights could be seen in many places in Germany and elsewhere.

In the eastern Brandenburg The northern lights were particularly intense. The photographer Patrick Pleul took spectacular photos there.

The natural spectacle was easy to observe under mostly clear skies, especially in the northern half of the country, said the German Weather Service in Potsdam. Clouds appeared in the early hours of the morning and ended the spectacle.

But also in Berlin, where the “Festival of Lights“People were thrilled to see northern lights in the night sky, even despite the bright urban lighting.

In Schleswig-Holstein, night owls enjoyed great moments like this:

The sky glowed over Thuringia:

Of course, the phenomenon also captivated people outside of Germany.

“Coronal mass ejection” causes auroras

On the surface of the sun on Tuesday (October 8th) there was a coronal mass ejection (CME) took place. Small, charged particles are ejected from the sun during eruptions and cause atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere to glow.

The CME in this case was enormous, with the charged plasma hurtling through space towards at an unimaginable speed of around 4.3 to 4.7 million km/h Earth and hit the Earth’s magnetic field at night. The Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in the USA spoke of an extremely violent plasma cloud and issued a “Storm Watch” for a geomagnetic storm of level G4 for October 10th and 11th.

According to a “polar light warning” from www.polarlicht-vorhersage.de for October 10th to 12th, the current probability of northern lights over Germany is “extremely high”.

According to the forecast by the US environmental agency NOAA, the maximum kp value (the measure of the strength of the solar storm) is expected to fall to a maximum of 5.33 on Saturday night. On Friday night there were up to 8. The following applies: the higher the value, the better the visibility in our latitudes.

On the one hand, solar storms create spectacular moments in the sky, but they can also affect the infrastructure.

But the northern lights are not the only celestial spectacle that is worth looking up at these days!

Comet passes by

Onlookers can watch a passing comet and its tail for several days.

With a lot of luck, Tsuchinshan Atlas – also called C/2023 A3 – could be spotted this Friday evening, said the head of the Urania Planetarium in Potsdam, Simon Plate. But that is difficult to predict.

According to the German Weather Service (DWD), the weather conditions are best during the night from Friday to Saturday. The sky in Berlin and Brandenburg will be slightly cloudy and clear, said a spokeswoman. In the following nights the clouds increase.

Comet appeared in the west on Thursday evening

According to the Association of Star Friends based in Bensheim in southern Hesse, C/2023 A3 should appear in the west on the evening horizon on October 10th. The celestial body could then be seen with the naked eye or binoculars at the earliest two days later and in the following nights. Visibility with the naked eye ends around October 25th.