Hyderabad: A billion-tonne cloud of magnetised plasma is hurtling toward Earth at 1,400 kilometres per second, and it will produce one of the rarest light shows the night sky has to offer.
But Hyderabad will not see the nothern lights.
The Sun erupted on June 6, hurling the cloud into space. It has been travelling for two days. It arrives on Tuesday, June 8, and the Space Weather Prediction Centre has issued a G3 (“strong”) geomagnetic storm watch, with brief G4 (“severe”) periods possible. The storm peaks between 11:30 PM IST and 2:30 AM IST on Tuesday, June 9.
Auroras, the curtains of green, red and purple light that ripple across the sky when charged solar particles collide with gases in the upper atmosphere, could be visible from parts of India. Hyderabad is not one of those parts, and neither is any other city where most Indians live.
Where to look and where not to
There is exactly one place in India where one can watch it.
Hanle, in Ladakh, 4,500 metres above sea level, sits at the edge of the auroral oval, the ring of charged light that encircles the poles during a major storm. On January 19 this year, all-sky cameras at the Indian Astronomical Observatory there watched the sky turn red. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics confirmed it. An aurora, burning silently above the Himalayan cold desert.
On Monday night, Hanle has a genuine shot at a repeat. High-altitude locations nearby – the Nubra Valley, Pangong Tso, parts of Kashmir, the higher reaches of the Uttarakhand Himalayas – carry slimmer but real possibilities. A faint red or pink glow on the northern horizon, visible only to a long-exposure camera and a person patient enough to wait for it.
That is as far south as it goes.
Delhi is cloudless but useless, and the city’s own light has made it blind to this for years. Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Chennai are under the monsoon.
The rest of the world
Internationally, tonight is a serious event. Scotland and Scandinavia are near-certain to see displays, the kind that fills the whole northern sky without needing a camera. Northern Germany and parts of Poland are well placed. So is Iceland.
In North America, Minneapolis, Seattle and much of Canada sit squarely in the auroral zone.
In the Southern hemisphere, Tasmania, New Zealand’s South Island and the southern tips of Argentina and Chile could see the aurora australis if the storm holds through their night hours.
Live data is available at swpc.noaa.gov, updated by the minute.
For those in Ladakh tonight, face north after midnight, find the darkest ground available, give your eyes 20 minutes to adjust and use a long-exposure camera, as it will see what the naked eye cannot.
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