Will you go out tonight, 2014/01/09, to look at the Northern Lights?

Definitely won’t be able to see them in LA county :( I’m envious of everyone up north.

Mad jelly Jelly here, way too far south.

They say they will be as far south as Colorado.
Those charged particles are speeding toward us as we speak. Duck!

A bucket list entry for me is the viewing of the Northern Lights. But it won’t happen for me in central Texas. I’m envious!

I doubt I’ll see them based on the research I’ve done despite living north enough.

Yes; we are on high alert here. I have seen them once before from my house, but they were pale, wan and anemic. I have higher hopes for tonight and Friday. My knee gets me up several times a night anyway. My sister and bro-in-law down the road are also on watch duty.

@LuckyGuy; Nothing is too geeky when it somes to spectacular sky events. I have seen two of the three…a total eclipse of the sun in 1975 and the Leonid meteor shower, 2ith 60–100 meteors per minute in the late 1990’s, neither of which I will ever forget.

Lame! I am visiting the folks down south this week or I’d be up around your latitude, @LuckyGuy – and would totally sit on my roof for this. But at least I’m skipping the polar vortex.

I wish! I’m sure the light pollution will make it impossible. I’ll probably have a glance just in case.

edit: “with 60 -100 meteors…”

The only thing obstructing my view is Lake Ontario with all its light pollution. Not!
I’ve got 40 miles of total darkness to my north. If the Aurora is there, I will see it.
Unless it occurs during Big Bang Theory.

@LuckyGuy:Check during every commercial break of TBBT. You don’t want to miss even a watered-down version. You can always watch TBBT either on the computer or on a rerun. Howard told me to tell you this.

Aurora forecast:

http://helios.swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/

You are indeed a @LuckyGuy.

I will stay on the North side of the house and not be walking on the woods to the South. There are scary critters skulking around out there.

I’ve always thought so. :)

@LuckyGuy: I can just lean out an upstairs window. I will not be taking my new knee outside on any snowy or icy patches tonight.

We’re socked in with cloud cover, so no aurora for us tonight. :(

Overcast and cloudy. No lights for us.

Broken clouds at 5500 feet not very good for look for northern lights.

Too late to edit I went out to look that’s how I know the cloud conditions.

10:00 PM There are light clouds to the north but I can still see the Big Dipper with its handle pointing down – even with the moon shining over my left shoulder. No Aurora yet – darn it.
I will go to bed now and if/when I wake up for a “midnight stroll” I will look again.

Exactly the same here. Cloud cover starting to cover the southern sky. And it is certainly nippt outside.

2:00 AM and it is snowing! I can’t see any stars. Boo.

Back to bed.

7:00 AM Still cloudy. Oh well….
I wonder if anyone saw them.

Side note: I see that the correct way to denote ante meridian and post meridian is “a.m.” and “p.m.”
I guess I didn’t pay attention in class when they taught that lesson.

Missed the opportunity to look last night. Feeling sick and fell asleep. I will try to give it a shot tonight. @LuckyGuy , what kind of critters are you scared of in those woods?

I don’t like coyote packs. A couple of weeks ago there were two separate packs of at least 6 each howling in the woods on both sides of me while I went out at night with a piece of leftover turkey carcass. (I leave it for a fox family.) The barking, yelping and howling went on for a couple of minutes – enough time for me to get into the house and call the neighbors so they could hear it too. They did. Then suddenly it stopped. We figure they took down a deer.

We have some big packs of coyotes around us. I wouldn’t want to take one on.

@LuckyGuy Why feed the foxes? Doesn’t that habituate them to humans and human food, and so endanger their lives?

@wildpotato The occasional carcass carried well away from one’s house into a woods is not like hand feeding, or leaving a foodpan in the yard. Native people have tossed aside scraps for thousands of years here, along with wagon caravans and explorers in the past three centuries. Dumping as a crowd, such as at campsites, and neighborhood dumpsters is the sort of things which cause those problems. It is a growing problem. I’m sure the foxes are not dependant on a few scraps. With that many coyotes prowling and howling there is ample hunting grouns for them to do plenty of hunting.
I live in the middle of a city, but the woods out back is big enough for turkeys, deer, squirrels, raccoons, geez, that is like half the list. We leave food out for them. Lots of our neighbors do. They don’t bother the trash cans so bad when there are scraps put out for them. They have existed where they are for a longo time. Right this moment over haqlf a dozen turkeys are right beyond my yard, browsing the woods for dry seed heads and bugs. If it weren’t for neighbors, they wouldn’t survive the winter. They Have become dependant on us to suppliment their feeding. There’s nothing really to do about it though. They are in an enclosed environment.
I applaud your concern, but I think in this case you are barking up the wrong foxhole. The concern belongs where human leavings draw wildlife from a fully functional habitat to eat in a less customary environment, such as bears coming out of the California mountains to eat from school dumpsters.

@wildpotato Good question. First, I do not put the food anywhere near the house. I place it out along the edge of our wooded area with my Infrared trail camera placed so it can photograph whoever comes by. I like the fox family because they help me with my rodent problem.
The squirrel problem was brought on over the years by area suburbanites who trap the squirrels in their Hav-a-hart traps and then illegally let them loose in the park across the street from me. They quickly multiplied and became a real nuisance: chewed vehicle wires, destroyed songbird nests, eaten bird food and destroyed feeders, nests in the house attic, nests in the tractor engine compartment, nest in the car intake air filter!
About 2 years ago I had had enough, as did another neighbor with similar problems. We began to legally shoot them as well as trapping any mice. Both of us got into the hundreds! Yes, it was that bad.
How to dispose of the squirrels? Each day, I would leave them in a particular spot near the tree line. By the next morning it would always be gone without a trace. I set up the camera to see what critter was taking it and learned a lot. A cat would tear it apart and leave a bit of a mess. The fox would take it away and bring it to its den. Surprisingly, skunks also take them away.
After a year of concerted effort, this season we had the best birds. Bluebirds, cardinals, slate colored Juncos, tufted titmice, nut hatches. orioles! It was wonderful. I attribute that to the reduction of robbed nests by marauding squirrels.
And the fox family helped!

I am a little worried that my camera has not seen any fox in over a week. I worry that the coyote pack might have gotten them. They would be no match for a pack of 50 pound beasts.

@Jonesn4burgers I figure it is ok to put out food waste for the critters. Rather than have the food rot in a landfill I figure it is better to give it ‘life’ by letting another animal consume it. (There is a touch of Zen in that statement.) I know a Buddhist (vegetarian) who would eat meat that was being wasted or thrown out since the animal had already sacrificed its life and he considered it a supreme insult to just throw it away.

@LuckyGuy I’m actually surprised that more squirrels didn’t take your squirrel carcasses. They are opportunists, and they don’t mind scavenging meat.

I’ve spent a lot of time in coyote country, and they are noisy critters, whatever happens to be on the menu.

@glacial I have never seen a squirrel take another , even if the vic is a red squirrel or a chipmunks. The foxes just swoop in and grab the morsel. Skunks play with it for a while but eventually take it away. Turkey vultures enjoy them too.

There was talk of being able to see them in the UK, as low as Birmingham (middle of the country) last night. Even though we are quite far south of that, my boyfriend was up a couple of times in the night, looking out of the window just in case! We found out this morning that they weren’t as active as predicted so I don’t think they were seen anywhere in the UK after all.