Northern Lights May Be Visible In Illinois Wednesday Night

A solar flare earlier this week could produce one of nature’s most spectacular shows — the Northern Lights — over the northern United States Wednesday night and into Thursday morning. Auroras may be visible from Washington state to New England, and possibly as far south as Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, according to a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

The lights are courtesy of what’s called a “coronal mass ejection” that occurred Monday. The sun, which is made up of hellishly hot charged particles called plasma roiled by a powerful magnetic field, does this all the time. It’s when plasma enters the Earth’s atmosphere that green, purple, yellow and red auroras dance across the sky.

While the skies will be cloudy in Chicago, that shouldn't prevent residents from seeing the Northern Lights, the National Weather Service told DNAInfo. If you're in the city, light pollution and tall buildings could be a factor, so you may want to head farther north to get a better look. Temperatures could get into the low 50s Wednesday night though, so you may want a jacket.

Two more powerful solar flares on Wednesday morning — one of them the most powerful in more than a decade — could create an outstanding display. But there’s some bad news, too. (For more information on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

If aimed toward Earth, the solar mass ejection, or CME, “could also damage satellites, communications and power systems,” according to space.com.

The first of the two solar flares at 4:10 a.m. Central time Wednesday was the strongest since 2015, but was dwarfed by one that occurred three hours later, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. The last one of that magnitude was in 2006.

The solar flares caused radio blackouts, according the the Space Weather Prediction Center, including to high-frequency radio, which experienced a “wide area of blackouts, loss of contact for up to an hour over [the] sunlit side of the earth.” Low-frequency communication, which is used in navigation systems, “was degraded for an hour.”

It won’t happen with these solar flares, but the brightly colored auroras have been seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii, as happened with “The Carrington Event of 1859,” the largest documented solar storm in the last 500 years. The storm shorted out telegraph wires in the United States in Europe, shocking some telegraph operators and sparking fires when discharges from the lines ignited telegraph paper, according to NASA.

To check on Northern Lights in your area, see if your state is along the yellow line or above on the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images News/Getty Images

By Beth Dalbey (Patch National Staff)