Aurora chasers

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About Aurora chasers

This group is part of Solar Stormwatch: a real science project that you can take part in, both at www.solarstormwatch.com and here on Flickr.

It’s all about delving into some big solar mysteries… and the one we’d like members of this group to tackle is, ‘What happens when solar storms whoosh past Earth?’

Scientists know that solar storms cause aurora, but the details remain tantalisingly undiscovered. Your photos can help reveal them – the colours in your aurora snaps tell scientists about the energy of the storms and information about your location tells them about the storm’s impact around the world.

Over at solarstormwatch.com our volunteers’ work is building a catalogue of past solar storms, with a date and direction for each one. We’re putting a photo of each Earth-directed storm in this group, tagged with its expected Earth arrival time and date. We’d like you to match up these pictures with your photos of aurora from the same time and date. To do that, just geotag them with their location and add an astrotag for the full GMT date and time. If you want to go the extra mile, you could even create a Flickr gallery of the event too, using photos that you find on Flickr.

And finally – solarstormwatch members are also keeping watch for Earth-bound solar storms in the spacecrafts’ near-real-time footage. This makes the Solar Stormwatch forecast: a prediction of upcoming events that you can use to get out there and photograph the effects of incoming solar storms.

http://www.solarstormwatch.com