Prepare for another dazzling Northern Lights show in Canada Wednesday night

This past Sunday the Sun’s surface threw off the largest explosion seen in two year and it had Earth in its cross-hairs. By early morning Tuesday the energetic and fast moving blast wave slammed into our planet’s protective magnetic field, causing intense Northern Lights shows across the entire Northern Hemisphere — including Canada — last night.

Skywatchers in parts of Canada and as far south as Kansas and Virginia reported on social media distinct, colourful glows, but if forecasters have it right, a cosmic second act may be in the works for tonight.

It turns out that two of these titanic bubbles of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections were belched by the sun over the weekend, but on their trip over to Earth, they merged into one gargantuan cloud measuring many times the size of our planet.

Once these fast moving particles hit Earth’s magnetosphere, they get naturally funneled down by the magnetic field towards the north and south poles. There they enter the atmosphere and interact with molecules in the air like oxygen and nitrogen — exciting them so that they begin to glow like a neon sign — and creating what we call the aurora borealis or northern lights.

Space forecasters this week were scrambling to figure out how powerful the CME could be in the early hours of Monday and predicted that it would give our planet only a glancing blow Wednesday morning, however the CME was much faster moving than originally thought and arrived about a day earlier than expected.

Initially, the storm’s strength was weak, however further analysis of it had the scientists over at NOAA Space Weather offices classify the solar event as a G4 level geomagnetic storm, the second strongest storm possible.

If these CMEs are intense enough, they can actually fry circuit boards of communication satellites and bring down power grids. Back in March of 1989, a massive CME brought about an intense geomagnetic storm that not only sparked a spectacular northern lights show, but shut down the entire Hydro-Quebec power grid for hours, leaving millions of Quebecers without power.

Thankfully, there have been no reports of any damage to power grids or communication satellites, but space agencies and power companies are monitoring the situation closely.

However space scientists are excepting that there may be intermittent disruptions in GPS service, creating conditions where it may take longer than usual to get a GPS lock on our devices.

While there is not much to be concerned about the solar storm, there may still be some great sky shows this evening. Weather permitting, the best bet to catch some northern lights action will be once darkness falls, with the best shows most likely closer to local midnight when skies are at there darkest.

Sky-watchers in southern parts of Canada may see dimmer auroras near the northern horizon, however the best views will be from dark locations away from the bright city lights.