Kurt, Thank you for informing and educating! I appreciate it and will keep a copy of your reply for future reference. When I sold drugs up in Montana in the early 1990's (ok, yes, a pharmaceutical rep./manager) I saw them once and it was marvelous. As soon as my pain meds kick in I"m off to bed and not staying up. Jay On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:

Jay,

The way to read the POES satellites composite plot is if the yellow area extends down to Nebraska, then you are good to go. The blue area isn't significant. The most northerly aurora I have observed was telescopically when the yellow area extended down to just south of the Montana-Canada border. From Little Mtn, a faint auroral curtain - like you see in those pictures from Alaska - could be seen using binoculars. The curtain was low over the horizon.

Basically, to see aurora in Utah, the planetary kp magnetic field has to get up above 6. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Aurora/globeNW.html

The blue line at this website plots the observed and predicted values of the planetary kp:

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rpc/costello/pkp_15m_24h.html

You can also watch the three hour planetary kp value here:

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today.html#satenv

Unless the observed kp starts getting up to 5, I don't get too excited.

This CME is pretty big, and I can't rule out an anomalous blast that might spike. But personally I'm not planning on staying up.

Clear Skies, Kurt

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