Incoming Coronal Mass Ejection == Pretty Aurora

Bill Kendrick writes: "SpaceWeather.com reports that a recent coronal mass ejection on the sun (photo) will be hitting the earth tonight and tomorrow night, causing midnight auroras in northerly points. The moon being a crescent will help, too. Check the skys around midnight, wherever you are."

Re:And here I am at lower latitudes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta give them something, right?

You're kidding, right? They've got the world's supply of fine maple syrup! Not to mention "playful" moose...

Re:And here I am at lower latitudes...

[stefanlasiewski]

True, why should God stop at beautiful beaches, colorful fish, warm weather and string bikinis....

Re:And here I am at lower latitudes...

[cybrpnk]

While I realize you are making a whimsical statement that I can agree with (I've never seen an aurora either), in case somebody out there doesn't know the real reason auroras show up at high latitudes (Canada etc) is that when the charged particles from the Sun hit Earth's magnetic field, these particles all follow the "magnetic field lines" to Earth's North and South magnetic poles which leads to a concentration effect and the charged particles get thick enough to interact visibly with the atmosphere ("see") when they follow the field lines right into the atmosphere towards the poles. How's THAT for a run-on sentence?

Updating the Excuse chart for today

[EvilBastard]

OK, so todays Excuse will be Solar Flares.

Much better then "System backup on the weekend is running longer then we expected and some systems will be down"

I actually liked this comment from further down

CLOSE ENCOUNTER: On March 8, 2002, a 70-meter wide asteroid glided by Earth only 1.2 times more distant than the Moon. Named 2002 EM7, the space rock approached our planet from the direction of the Sun and was discovered by MIT's LINEAR search program four days after the flyby. Recent observations suggest that the asteroid won't come so close again for at least 100 years.

Try to place yourself between the sun and the enemy. This puts the glare of the sun in the enemy's eyes and makes it difficult to see you and impossible for him to shoot with any accuracy.

Oswald Boelcke, 1916

Damn Columbus

[Anztac]

Just my luck, when it's the foggiest cloudiest night I've seen in two years something pretty happens.

Large Ad Problems

[tiny69]

I'd like to interrupt this regularly scheduled troll fest and take the opportunity to complain about the new large ads.

When viewing /. in "light" mode, the large ads don't play very nice. They cover up the buttons to change the threshold and to reply to the article (as viewed with Mozilla (I don't care about how well your browser displays them as I don't use your browser!)).

On a personal note, I don't see how the large ads will generate more revenue or clicks. They are simply more annoying then the old ad size. The products they advertise are more memorable. But when I see the product somewhere else, all I think of is, "That's that product in those fucking annoying ads!"

Thank you for you time. We now return you to your regularly scheduled troll fest...