The northern lights may be visible Saturday and Sunday in parts of the country where they\u0027re rarely seen.
The only parts of the country not included in an “alert” issued by the observatory are the southernmost points in Ontario, southwestern Vancouver Island and southeastern parts of the Atlantic provinces, including all of Nova Scotia.
But the observatory, run through a partnership between the University of Calgary, the City of Yellowknife, the Canadian Space Agency and a local astronomy organization, says it is still possible that the lights may be visible in those parts of the country. Eric Donovan, a professor at the University of Calgary’s department of physics and astronomy who studies the aurora, said while he’s always hesitant to make predictions, observations suggest a large magnetic storm may make the aurora more visible further south than usual.Article content
“There’s a very good chance … there will be very good aurora over large parts of Canada that don’t see it often,” he said, adding that the sky will have to be clear and other factors are at play. “The aurora is driven by the solar wind, the solar wind is this gas of ionized particles that comes out of the sun all the time,” he said in an interview Saturday. “What happens is that gas interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field and that process extracts energy from the solar wind.”“What people are predicting tonight, is that there will be a dramatic increase in the rate that energy is being delivered to this system.
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