Some skywatchers in Maryland caught a glimpse of the northern lights early Sunday morning, though there was less to see the following night.

“We felt it would be unlikely, but not entirely impossible, to see the aurora from Maryland last night – but you never know for sure,” Shawn Dahl, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, said in an email.

Dahl said he had not heard of any Maryland-based sightings from Sunday night.

Stephanie Sweigert, a “self-proclaimed space nerd,” caught a glimpse of an earlier aurora borealis before 4 a.m. Sunday morning from her home in Edgewood — though it was only visible through a camera, not the naked eye. She had less success with the subsequent, weaker event that night, and didn’t catch anything. The northern lights form when charged particles from geomagnetic storms, also known as coronal mass ejections, come into contact with Earth’s upper atmosphere over the polar regions.

“After those collisions happen and things settle down, it emits light and this process continues,” Dahl said during an earlier interview.

Geomagnetic storms are measured in strength on a scale from G1 through G5. Sunday morning’s event reached G4 intensity, but later that night only reached G3 — possibly too weak to be visible from Maryland, Dahl said.

Sunday morning’s event at 1:30 a.m. was from a storm that came from the sun Thursday evening, according to Dahl. The power of the geomagnetic storm, like that of a rain storm, can fluctuate. “The level can change during the course of a storm’s progression over Earth,” Dahl said. But the storm will weaken as it passes over the planet, eventually leaving it behind, he said.

Dahl said the Space Weather Prediction Center is monitoring new, faint coronal mass ejections for potential arrival Monday night, but predicting the arrival time isn’t exact, he said.

“We’re trying to forecast something that left the sun 93 million miles away,” Dahl said. Predicting strength, arrival time and if the storms will even hit Earth is “very hard to figure that out when you only have a couple of spacecraft that are taking pictures of the sun, but we do our best,” he said.

Using the Sunday morning storm as an example, Dahl said the Space Weather Prediction Center had initially predicted it would hit Earth in the late afternoon Sunday then adjusted the arrival time to Sunday at noon, but it actually arrived nine to 12 hours earlier, causing the visible aurora at around 3 a.m.

There was activity again Sunday night, and forecasts showed Maryland on the fringe of where it could have been visible at around 10:15 p.m. — though it might have been too bright out, Dahl said. There were also small escalations around midnight that could’ve made brief appearances on camera, he said, though Dahl hadn’t seen any as of Monday afternoon. Nighttime clouds Sunday might have also complicated local viewing attempts.

Even if local stargazers didn’t catch the aurora Sunday, they can look forward to seeing Mercury in the western sky June 20. Later, August will bring the Perseid meteor shower, though a bright waning gibbous moon might overshadow the show.

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