Misinformation Age : Northern Lights Edition

Aurora November 7, 2004

   This past week the Sun unleashed an X-1 class flare(X is the strongest class, X-1 is the weakest of X-class flares) in the general direction of Earth.  NOAA's space weather forecast center put the odds of an auroral display for the mid-latitudes (which includes all of Michigan) at 50% for the 24-hr forecast period.  The Detroit Free Press posted an article on their website that included  phrases like "could be visible", "might get a treat", "there is a possibility" all reflecting the uncertain nature of how particles cast off by the Sun will react with the Earth's magnetic field.   So why did the headline writers attach the headline "Solar Flare to bring Northern Lights over southeast Michigan tonight"  that made it sound like a sure thing?  Here is a link to the article.  http://www.freep.com/article/20140108/NEWS06/301080120/Michigan-northern-lights

  WDIV channel 4's website had an article that included the appropriate 'coulds','mays' and 'mights'.  Then they included a follow-up article that included a (cellphone?)photo that appears to show Light Pillars (vertical columns of light which are caused by ground lighting being reflected by horizontally faced ice crystals suspended in sub-zero air) and declared "We did get some Northern Lights".  http://www.clickondetroit.com/weather/we-did-get-some-northern-lights/-/1719236/23855032/-/gahm35z/-/index.html
  
  If the photo accompanying the article is an auroral display they scooped the whole skywatching community because no one else in the lower 48 states reported or submitted photos of the northern lights to spaceweather.com 
   If there had been a display visible from southeast Michigan the aurora gallery of spaceweather(dot)com would have been flooded with photos from the northern tier of states.

  Nearly everyone says they want to see the Northern Lights,  but how badly do you want to see them?  You can't rely on news outlets.   You don't get birding tips from them so don't get your astronomy tips from them either. You have to research it yourself and a good place to start is the aforementioned  spaceweather.com 
  Once you figure out their forecasts, it only takes seconds to assess the probability of an auroral display.  Then when there is a 50% chance of a display in the next 24 hours you have to consider that at least half of those hours are either bright twilight or daylight, so your chances are now down to lower than 25%.  And if you're only going to check the sky in the evening (between 7 PM and midnight) your chances are down to 5/24 x 50%, or about 10%.  That 10% chance assumes you live away from a major metropolitan area where stray light washes away the contrast needed to make the aurora visible.  Contrast in  night sky can also be faded by bright moonlight.  So if most or all of the above apply the original 50% forecast is down to about 1%.

  This isn't rocket surgery, but it does take some effort.

Cranes at Dusk

           Tuesday I spent the whole day trying to photograph birds.  Starting out in my yard I didn't see anything of note except this Cooper's Hawk that visits pretty regularly.

   Headed to Lake Erie Metropark where I saw no migrating hawks.  From there I went to Ohio and refound the Snow Buntings at Maumee Bay State Park.

  Also a late season Great Egret passed by.

   From there I drove back toward Toledo and Woodlawn Cemetery to look for Red Crossbills.  Didn't find any  but got some shots of a female White-winged Crossbill and a Pine Siskin.

   Back in the fall of O-10,  a Whooping Crane made nightly fly-ins with the Sandhill Cranes at the roost in Haehnle Marsh in Jackson County.  Last year high water in the marsh kept even the Sandhills away.  This fall the Sandhills are roosting in record numbers which topped out over 7000 in early November.  Also last week the same Whooper returned.  What's so special about a Whooping Crane?  It is the tallest bird in North America standing about 5 feet tall.  It has a 7.5' wingspan.  In 1941 their population had dwindled to 21 due to hunting and habitat loss.  Even after years of  breeding programs the conservation effort has yielded a wild population of only 421 as of 2011. 
  Of course the cranes on Tuesday didn't start pouring into the marsh until after the sun had set, so picking out the Whooper among the thousands of Sandhills was impossible.  Here is a photo I took two years ago.

Whoop, there it is

 
Some more shots from Tuesday.

  

Northern Shovelers

     Everyone wants to live forever or at least leave a legacy.  Very few however have the legacy of their sense of humor etched in stone.

  Back on Thanksgiving, between the 8 hours of work, family get-together,and the cooking of the pierogis and kielbasa, I had time to do a load of laundry.  I took the laundry bag from the hamper in the bathroom down to the washing machine in the basement. 

Laundry basket looking deceivingly empty.

  Five minutes later when I returned the laundry bag to the hamper.  I found this....

Re-enactment of Baby Jessica stuck in the well

    It is well documented( http://mostlybirdsbutnotalways.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-birds.html ) that my cat Comet likes to hang out in the bathroom so that she can try to persuade anyone to turn on the water in the sink so that she can get a drink of fresh water.  Beside camping out on the counter waiting for someone to enter the bathroom, she also likes to wait on top of the laundry basket.  What happened here is that she tried to jump on top of the basket.  Being a cat she doesn't notice that the top has been removed.  So instead of landing on her perch she fell into the basket.  Being a quirky cat she didn't care and made the most of her predicament and settled in for a nap.

Vultures and Eagles



Adult Bald Eagle

    Turkey Vulture (TV) Migration over Southeast Michigan reaches its peak around the middle of October every year.   Yesterday October 12, 2012   favorable conditions resulted in a total of 10,000  TVs counted at the Lake Erie Metropark (LEMP) hawk count.   As many of the birds passed to the south of the count area my friend Pat Mulawa and I headed south to the Point Mouillee State Game Area HQ to get a better view. 

Kettle Of Turkey Vultures



    Several groups flew almost straight over head providing me with some nice photo ops as Pat scanned the skies picking out other hawks and eagles.

Immature Turkey Vulture  (note dark head)

Immature Bald Eagle showing lots of white on its belly

   Pat marveled at the symmetry of the wing pattern  of the Bald Eagle pictured below.  Later when I zoomed in on the display screen on my camera, I noticed that pattern resembled eyes with the symmetry broken by the eye on the birds right wing (our left) being open and the left wing eye closed in a winking manner.  Eyespot mimicry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_(mimicry) is an evolutionary defense mechanism where animals with spots that look like big eyes are less likely to be preyed upon.  Animals that benefit from this,  range from Tiger Swallowtail larva to Buckeye Butterfly adults to Four-eye Butterfly Fish to the Servals of Africa.  The pattern on this Eagle's wing has nothing to do with that because it already looks menacing enough and it resides at the top of its food chain.  More likely it has to do with the human brain trying to make sense of patterns.  That's how perceived images of Elvis, Jesus and the Virgin Mary are interpreted as messages from beyond in everything from toast, pizza pans, stains on overpasses, tree bark and  lastly and definitely leastly (I'm not making this up) no disrespect intended...... dog butts.

  http://bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com/2006/09/jesus-image-found-in-dogs-butt.html   

Another immature Bald Eagle with winking owl pattern

Uncropped photo of previous bird shows its great altitude more accurately

   The distant birds in the above and below photographs look pretty similar but while I was taking photos of the second bird Pat was watching it with his spotting scope and was able to see the telltale wing patches that are characteristics of an Immature Golden Eagle.  

Vastly different bird at similar altitude

     

Cropped version showing white wing patches of immature Golden Eagle

    The Golden Eagles migrating through Southeast Michigan are most likely coming from their breeding grounds in Northeast Ontario and Northern Quebec at least 600 miles away. It's always pretty cool to see them pass over. This one here is one of the early ones as the peak of the migration at LEMP is between October 20- November 10.   Show up at the LEMP Hawkwatch site during that timeframe on a day with light winds with a northerly component to them and you most likely will get to see a Golden.  If you're lucky you'll get a view like the one I got last year on October 28 when the bird below flew almost straight overhead at a relatively low altitude.   I'd been trying for years to get that shot. 

Golden Eagle at Lake Erie Metropark 10/28/11

Same bird only closer

Prepare to be disappointed (or amazed)

   A word of caution - comets are notoriously fickle, spectacular predictions based on early observations often lead to big letdowns.

      On November 28, 2013, Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., the midday Sun may have a companion as it travels across the sky.  Comet ISON (  C/2012 S1) will execute a hairpin turn as it passes 1.8 million km above the Sun's surface.  Considering the diameter of the Sun is 1.3 million km this is an extremely close encounter. If the comet can survive the heat and tidal forces it has been estimated that it may shine as bright or brighter than the full moon.  If it attains that brightness it could be visible during the day one degree away from the Sun.   Of course you will have to block the sun out (by standing in the shadow of a building perhaps), to view it.   The potential of this comet has been compared to the Great Comet of 1680 and the Great Comet of 2007.  It has an uncannily similar orbit to the 1680 comet which sported a 70-90 degree long tail and its head was briefly visible during daylight in December of that year.  It has been suggested that the current comet and the 1680 comet may have split from one object in the distant past.

   The Great Comet of 2007 you ask?  How did you miss that one?  Comet McNaught (C2006 P1) brightened rapidly as it approached the Sun in January 2007.  This blogger found out about it on January 4th of that year and after making 3 unsuccessful attempts to view it through mostly cloudy skies in bright twilight I finally succeeded on January 10 and captured a few photos.

1/10/2007  Comet McNaught  5 minutes after sunset



1/10/2007 Comet McNaught in bright twilight

     As winter weather goes in southeast Michigan the skies clouded over for the next week and I never saw the Great Comet of 2007 again.   Here is a link to Spaceweather.com archive from January 2007. http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?month=01&day=13&year=2007&view=view   In the middle of the page there is a photo gallery of the comet.  Perusing through the gallery you can see photos taken in midday (around page7) in which the comet is clearly visible while only 5 degrees from the Sun.    After its close approach to the Sun the comet went on to become a spectacular sight in the Southern Hemisphere as shown from page 11 onward in the above link.

   On January 10, 2007 Comet McNaught brightness was estimated at magnitude -3 or -4.  The brightness of celestial objects is measured on an inverted exponential scale., where  lower numbers indicate greater brightness.  For example an object of magnitude 3 is roughly 2.5 times brighter than a fourth magnitude object and every five steps lower on the scale equals one hundred times brighter.  For example the full moon shines at -11 magnitude, while the Sun shines -26. The 15 steps (or 3 steps of 5) of magnitude difference makes the Sun 100 x 100 x 100 or 1 million times brighter than the full moon.   The preliminary estimates of Comet ISON's predicted maximum brightness  next November range from -6 to -16.
  
    Comet experts say there really won't be any tweaking of predictions possible until August of next year. For now it's just a waiting game.   I tend to be a pessimist, that way I'm never disappointed.   I don't have time to be disappointed because I'm usually too busy disappointing others.  Therefore, I foresee the grand expectations fizzling out as the comet burns up before it's solar encounter.  I will however be ready to document the apparition if the Oort cloud visitor gets anywhere near it's predicted brightness. 
   
   To be continued......