Small CME impact, Record visitor amount

Sunday, 12 May 2024 10:12 UTC

On a more personal note, we crushed all visitor records yesterday both on the website and app. For the first time ever we couldn't handle the traffic anymore despite heavy optimizations to prevent the server buckling during intense geomagnetic storms when we always get a massive spike in people visiting us. Turing off the forums for a few hours did the trick to keep us online as the forums are very database intensive. We want to thank every single one of you for choosing us as your place to get your space weather news and data. So many of you saw aurora for the first time in their life. This is what we do it for. We witnessed space weather history. All of us. Together. Remember that.

Back to space weather, we see small uptick in the solar wind speed going from 830km/s to 900km/s and the Bt jumped from 5nT to 11nT. Low values compared to what we had on Friday and Saturday of course but this uptick has to be one of the expected coronal mass ejections passing our planet but this looks more like a glancing blow rather than a head on impact. The north-south orientation of the IMF (Bz) is northward however so at the moment we expect not a lot of effects, but with a solar wind speed of 900km/s and an agitated magnetic field around our planet, there isn't much needed for geomagnetic conditions to increase up to the G1 or G2 level.

Header image: Aurora Borealis captured by Steffen from Spain (Ibiza).