Capturing the Milky Way is one of the most rewarding challenges in photography. You are trying to photograph faint starlight against a dark sky, and the camera you bring matters more than almost any other gear choice. Our team has spent years shooting night sky photography across dark sky reserves, and we have tested these … Read more
How Ionospheric Scintillation Disrupts GNSS Signals ( )Every time your surveying rover drops RTK fix on a clear-sky afternoon, or your autonomous tractor wanders off its guidance line for no apparent reason, the culprit might be 300 kilometers above your head. Ionospheric scintillation is one of the most misunderstood and frustrating sources of GNSS signal … Read more
You saw the alert pop up on your phone. “Geomagnetic storm watch tonight.” Your heart rate ticks up a notch. The aurora might be visible, and you are already mentally mapping out a route north to darker skies. But then the doubt creeps in. Is it actually worth a two-hour drive? Will you arrive and … Read more
Every second, the Sun converts about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, releasing energy that has sustained life on Earth for billions of years. But occasionally, our star hiccups. Solar flares erupt from its surface in brilliant flashes of electromagnetic radiation, and most of the time, we barely notice. Then there are superflares, explosions … Read more
The Sun sits about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth, and when it erupts, different types of solar storms take wildly different amounts of time to cover that distance. If you have ever wondered how long does it take solar storms to reach earth, the short answer is anywhere from 8 minutes to … Read more
One of the most satisfying moments in aurora chasing is predicting a display before anyone else sees it coming. The secret behind many of those predictions is a feature on the Sun called a coronal hole. Understanding coronal hole aurora prediction over 27 days gives you a powerful forecasting tool that most casual skywatchers never … Read more
You are standing in a frozen field somewhere in northern Minnesota at 1:47 AM. Your fingers ache through two layers of gloves. You have been staring at the sky for three hours, and so far, you have seen exactly nothing. Then someone in your group whispers, “There.” A pale band of light, barely visible, stretches … Read more
On the night of May 10, 2024, farmers across the American Midwest looked up and saw something breathtaking. The aurora borealis painted the sky in vivid reds and greens, visible as far south as Florida and Texas. But the same cosmic spectacle that lit up the heavens was quietly wreaking havoc on the ground. GPS-guided … Read more
Solar storms throw off GPS accuracy by disturbing the ionosphere, the charged layer of Earth’s upper atmosphere that GPS signals must pass through. In calm conditions, a standard single-frequency GPS receiver provides position accuracy of about 3 to 10 feet (1 to 3 meters). During a severe geomagnetic storm, those errors can balloon to 30 … Read more
On March 13, 1989, a coronal mass ejection from the Sun slammed into Earth’s magnetic field and collapsed Hydro-Quebec’s entire power grid in just 90 seconds, leaving six million people without electricity for nine hours. The 1989 Quebec blackout remains the most dramatic example of how solar activity can disrupt modern infrastructure, and understanding why … Read more