Themis Satellites and the Northern Lights

The THEMIS program includes a constellation of satellites that monitor the magnetosphere as well as ground based monitoring.  They are monitoring the particles from the sun with produces the northern lights.

NASA put out a video on a recent discovery regarding when more solar partials penetrate the magnetosphere.  When the earth’s and the sun’s magnetic fields were aligned, up to 20 times more solar particles could penetrate the earth’s magnetosphere.

The news story on space.com

The NASA THEMIS satellites video

If you want to know the the earth’s current aurora, you can go to space weather for the current aurora oval.  The sun is currently as a low point for sunspot activity, which is related to solar flares, which causes aurora, so don’t expect too much right now.

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