Michigan Could See Northern Lights This Week

Keep your eyes to the skies as early as tonight!

Already the sky has been giving us so much light and excitement to look towards like the full blue moon on Halloween and the upcoming, rare alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that will appear to us on Earth as a Christmas star. Now, this week we have the possibility of seeing the Northern Lights to look forward to!

According to MLive, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a Geomagnetic Storm watch after an eruption in a sunspot is projected to head towards Earth.

What's even more interesting about what causes this phenomenon, MLive cites NOAA in that it is all caused by a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)...Yeah, you read that right, CORONAL...get it? Corona...even in rare space phenoms, this Corona stuff still looms.

Anyways, MLive says NOAA defines these CMEs as "large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun’s corona. They can eject billions of tons of coronal material and carry an embedded magnetic field."

Without getting too science-y, this basically means that the energy will hit Earth but build up strength...So, MLive reports NOAA is predicting the energy from this particular CME will hit our atmosphere today, increasing up to Thursday and peaking between 10 p.m. tonight and 1 a.m. Thursday night.

There's all kinds of other facts and figures that go into just how it all works and how we can predict the lights' visibility but what it really comes down to is that we here in Michigan, if skies are clear enough, could get to see this magnificent display even as far south as the Michigan/Ohio/Indiana border!

As someone who has never seen the Northern Lights, this is absolutely incredible and I know I will be busting out our fire pit, throwing on my warmest clothes and sitting in my yard awaiting the display!