Aurora Borealis visible from the Commonwealth

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) - Thursday night, many Kentuckians got to view the Northern Lights right from their backyard.

You won’t have to travel to see a sky full of colors as there’s another slight chance to catch the northern lights in Kentucky Friday night.

It’s all thanks to a geomagnetic solar storm.

“Around this time of the solar cycle, which we call solar maximum, we have a larger than average amount of particles that get released from the sun,” EKU Astronomy Professor Mark Pitts said. “That was the phenomenon that occurred last night (Thursday night). We had a particularly intense stream of solar particles interacting with their atmosphere.”

Pitts said it’s called the Aurora Borealis and that the position of where you look in the sky matters.

“The best thing to do is to get to the north of any large cities or town,” he said. “Any place that has a lot of light pollution.”

This colorful display is hard to see with the naked eye; to catch the shades of pink, green and purple at home, you’ll need the help of a smartphone.

“Cell phone cameras can be used to make time exposures,” Astronomy Professor Tom Trolland said. “If the cell phone camera is pointing towards the aurora for a period of a few seconds, then it picks up more light than the eye can.”

Trolland said you might only see a tiny shade of color Friday night, but it’s likely this storm isn’t the last time you’ll see something like this.

“The sun is spitting out more of these particles already,” Trolland said. “It was doing so in May and it’s still doing so now. It will continue to do so almost certainly for the next year or so.”

If you want to catch a shade of the colorful sky as it moves up north, it could be slightly visible from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.