Connect with us

Pennsylvania

Northern lights put on show for stargazers across parts of Philadelphia region

Published

on

Northern lights put on show for stargazers across parts of Philadelphia region


PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — An unusually strong solar storm hitting Earth produced stunning displays of color in the skies across parts of the Philadelphia region early Saturday morning.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning when a solar outburst reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours sooner than anticipated.

This is NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center’s first severe geomagnetic storm watch in nearly 20 years.

The solar flares are associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directed toward Earth. CMEs are expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s corona, the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Advertisement

When these ejections head toward Earth, taking as long as days or as little as 15 hours, they cause geomagnetic storms, which are disturbances in the magnetic field around the planet.

“Then fast-moving particles slam into our thin, high atmosphere, colliding with Earth’s oxygen and nitrogen particles,” according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “As these air particles shed the energy they picked up from the collision, each atom starts to glow in a different color,” giving us the aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere and the aurora australis in the southern hemisphere.

Quicker clearing of skies just before dawn in our region allowed for better chances to see the northern lights Saturday. The celestial show was captured from South Jersey to northeastern Pennsylvania.

The geomagnetic storm is expected to last through the weekend. You can share your photos with Action News here.

The SWPC recommends traveling away from city lights to experience the full brightness of the aurora and to be looking at the skies within two hours of midnight, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. local time.

Advertisement

These storms also have the ability to potentially disrupt communications, the electric power grid, radio signals and satellite operations. As of Saturday, there were no immediate reports of disruptions.

Severe geomagnetic storms in October 2003 caused the northern lights to be seen as far south as Texas but it affected more than half of all Earth-orbiting spacecrafts and temporarily disrupted satellite TV and radio services. Additionally, several deep space missions had to be put in safe mode or completely shut down to prevent them from being disrupted.

ABC News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2024 WPVI-TV. All Rights Reserved.



Source link

Advertisement

Pennsylvania

Multiple Reports Of Fireball Sighting In Eastern PA Skies

Published

on

Multiple Reports Of Fireball Sighting In Eastern PA Skies


Multiple people in the Philadelphia region reported seeing a fireball in the sky Tuesday.

The American Meteor Society listed the event in its meteor sighting database, saying it had received nearly 150 reports from across the region, including in Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut about the fireball.

According to the database, reports of the fireball came in from Doylestown, Lansdale, Willow Grove, King of Prussia and more.

Nick Brucato of Whiting shared video of it in The Pine Barrens group on Facebook and with Patch. “Took this video as fast as I could today in Whiting at 2:34 PM. Heard the loud boom minutes later,” he said.

Advertisement

“We were out on our deck and my wife saw it,” a Waretown resident said on the Tri-County Scanner News post. “She said it was bright white ball and then it broke apart into several pieces and then it was gone. Then the sonic boom hit!”

A meteor is the flash of moving light that becomes visible when a meteoroid — a chunk of an asteroid or a comet — hits the Earth’s atmosphere, according to the American Meteor Society.

In mid-March another meteor was the likely cause of a large boom that was felt over parts of Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.

The National Weather Service in Pittsburgh said it received reports from numerous people across Western Pennsylvania of the tremendous noise and a fireball in the sky on March 17.

A weather service employee caught the cause of the boom and the weather service posted it. MORE: Meteor Causes Tremendous Boom Over Parts Of PA

Advertisement

With reporting by Karen Wall





Source link

Continue Reading

Pennsylvania

Pa. data centers: How lawmakers are responding, from electricity and water use to tax breaks

Published

on

Pa. data centers: How lawmakers are responding, from electricity and water use to tax breaks


What data centers think of Matzie’s bill

The Data Center Coalition is watching bills like Matzie’s closely. The coalition represents companies including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, CoreWeave and OpenAI.

Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy with the group, said the coalition is open to special utility rates for large electricity users that force these customers to pay for any grid upgrades their operations require while insulating other ratepayers from these costs. But the group opposes bills like Matzie’s that apply specifically to data centers, rather than to all electricity users over a certain size.

“If it’s a transmission line or if it’s a substation, if it’s a generating asset, of course, data centers should pay for that and will pay for that,” Diorio said.

But “no specific end user should be singled out for disparate treatment,” he said.

Advertisement

The coalition also opposes mandating data centers to curtail energy use during times of peak demand or bring their own new, clean power, preferring instead incentives that reward data centers for voluntarily doing so, Diorio said.

“Things like having to take interruptible service … you could see projects move across to a different state line where they didn’t have that requirement, while doing nothing to solve the ultimate shortfall within [the regional grid],” he said.

Pennsylvania lobbying records show the Data Center Coalition spent $19,632 on lobbying at the state level on the topic of “energy, information technology and utilities” during the last three months of 2025.

“Pennsylvania is a very strong, growing and important market for the data center industry,” Diorio said. “We understand concerns, and we want to be an engaged stakeholder to address those concerns, but also keep the state strong for development. And I think we can do that — I think we can find a good middle ground.”

Advertisement



Source link

Continue Reading

Pennsylvania

Parents charged after toddler injured by wolf at Pennsylvania zoo

Published

on

Parents charged after toddler injured by wolf at Pennsylvania zoo




Parents charged after toddler injured by wolf at Pennsylvania zoo – CBS News

Advertisement













Advertisement




























Advertisement

Watch CBS News


The parents of a 17-month-old child are facing endangerment charges after the toddler stuck his hand under the fence of a wolf enclosure at a Pennsylvania zoo. Tom Hanson reports.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending