Did you get a glimpse of the Aurora Australis last night? Matt Woods from the per Observatory went on a trek last night and got some absolutely amazing photos. Could I Matt?
Good to talk to you, Hey, Simon, how are you doing good?
Mate? Where did you end up having to get to to get those photos?
Yeah? I traveled out to the central Wheat Belt, so I went to Boyd and Rock near Brookton. I had thought about going to Mount Dale and testing my SUV's ability to climb a mountain, but it was a little bit too close to the cloudy weather, so I just continued on and had a little bit of a ten minute track up to the rock, and thankfully it was
a really nice view. You could just make it out as a grayish, pinkish haze on the southeast corner, but as soon as I started taking the photos you could clearly see it.
Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? And there was some cloud cover metro last night, so it was always going to be tricky. So the further un east, the more guy you got. That's the thing, isn't it matter? Often to the naked eye, as you say, just looks like a like a bit of a bit hazy, but often a camera lens really puts in focus, doesn't it.
Yeah, it was looking really promising like it could possibly be something like say August last year, where if you were down like I was down at Ireland Point Reserve just twenty minutes south of Mandra and you could clearly see it with your own eyes. We weren't fully you know, we weren't expecting it to be anything like May or October. Where it was. It didn't matter where you were, even
in the suburbs, you could still see that red. But it just unfortunately there's the polarity just we needed it to be a negative polarity, and it was a positive. So you know, in terms of when the storm hitting the earth, it's like an off switch if it's mainly a positive polarity for the storm. And so it just was really doing things. So you did need to be out out of the city to actually be able to see it any great detail, particularly with the camera.
Tell me what that means that what's the polarity argument.
So there's an embedded in the solar storm. There is an up down magnetic field direction and we call it BZ and we track that, and it's one of the most important tools we use to see whether it's worth actually going out. So a negative BZ meaning south, is more like an on switch for the aurora, where a positive is like an off switch. So it's just not
the atmosphere wasn't charging up. So what happens is you had a solar storm sent from the Sun about eight am on the thirty first of May our time, and it took about a day and a half to get here. So the Earth is also has a strong magnetic field that protects us. And so if anyone's ever done that high school experiment where you get the bar magnet and you dip the iron, you get pour iron filings over it, you see the magnetic field lines. Yep, that's what's protecting us.
So that our magnetic field pushes that solar particles around, deflex it, but some of it comes back along the magnetic field lines and then hits the atmosphere and the actual solar particles interacting with the oxygen and nitrogen particles causes those particles to glow like a neon sign. And that's what we're seeing, all right.
And madam just looking while I'm talking to just looking at some of the reports around Australia and New South Wales, Tazzy over here in Wa. It was quite quite the show last night, wasn't it.
Yeah, particularly on the East Coast. It hit here about mid afternoon, so it was perfect timing for New Zealand and for the East Coast, and that initial brunt was actually quite strong, so you get a lot a lot of streaks in the images coming from on the from New Zealand, then from the East Coast, so by the time it got here it was a little bit dull.
But hey, you know you're not I'm not complaining. I drove an hour and a half hours to drive and I was sick with a cold and I managed to get something, so it would have been a hell of a sad trip back if I didn't get well.
Mate, Hey, matare they your private photos?
Are they?
Or there's the observatory own them?
So they're my photos that I share them with the observatory because I took it with the observatory camera.
So yeah, I just wondered if we can both Yeah, I might see if we can let our just listen to scene, if that's okay. I might see if our people can talk to your people on that.
Yeah, And it's one of those things that you know, you guys, people can go out and see this themselves. There's really good apps out there where you can keep an eye like the Glendale Aurora app is really good to look at, especially if you want to learn this. You know it will tell you. It has a little help functions each on each of the little graphs, but you can keep an eye on like this. Really good Facebook pages as well. There's like the Aurora Australa's West
Australia page which you can join. Also pac Man Space where there's really good I always just double check my information as well as checking of course, there's the bombs Aurora page and also Noah in America will give you a really good data as well. And it's one of those things it's just persistence. You just got to go out and you will get rewarded in the end. I remember the October when I went out five nights in a row because the we just kept on being hit
by a solar storm. But unfortunately that polarity just was not the right way and it was the sixth day where I wasn't actually going to be hanging around. I was late at work doing reports and it just happened to just change, and all of a sudden we got an absolutely magical display that you know I'll never forget.
Yeah, all right, mat, good to talk to you as always, Thanks for chatting to our listeners, and I'll put you back to Ann and Linz and see if we can grab a version or at least grab a link to where people can go and see your shots from last night. Thanks mate, Yeah, Norris