Watch Video of the Northern Lights Dazzling Over Missouri

It's not common that the Northern Lights are visible as far south as Missouri. However, a surprise solar storm this week caused these lights to appear and they were dazzling as a new video share shows.

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As I shared earlier this week, there was a surprise solar storm with an Earth-directed CME that made forecasters advise the Aurora Borealis aka Northern Lights might be visible over the northern parts of Illinois. That forecast turned out to be conservative as the Northern Lights were brilliant even over parts of Missouri as Dan Bush of Missouri Skies on YouTube captured video of the event from McFall.

As Dan mentioned, it was a G3 geomagnetic storm from the sun that was responsible for this incredible display of dancing lights.

If you check out NOAA's Aurora Forecast website, you'll notice that most of the time the lights only extend as far south as Canada and sometimes the northern parts of the United States like Minnesota and Montana. The fact that this week's solar storm brought these cool lights to skies over Missouri is awesome.

By the way, NOAA also has an experimental dashboard which attempts to forecast the Northern Lights further into the future if you'd like to see the next time the Aurora Borealis might be visible to our eyes in the middle of America.