Possible We’ll See Northern Lights Over Tri-States Saturday Night

If you're a fan of pretty things in the sky, pray that weather is clear this weekend. Due to recent solar flares, there's a real chance we'll see the Northern Lights viewable from our area Saturday night.

My wife directed me to a status from the Illinois Storm Community tonight with some very compelling evidence that the Aurora Borealis overhead Saturday night. Not just off in the distance on the horizon (which is amazing also), but maybe even directly overhead. Yes, that's us. The Northern Lights maybe over Missouri and Illinois.

This prediction of Northern Lights over Missouri and Illinois is confirmed by Accuweather. They rate our view as "Good".

Space.com detailed the major solar flare from an Earth-directed sun spot earlier tonight:

The sun fired off an X1-class solar flare, its most powerful kind of flare, that peaked at 11:35 a.m. EDT (1535 GMT), according to an alert from the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which tracks space weather events.

It's rather exceptional to think that the Northern Lights could be seen this far south. It was a couple weeks ago when they were seen over northern Iowa and we thought that was special.

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If you look at Forbe's list of the best place to see the Northern Lights, you won't see any of our cities on the list. That could change if the space weather forecast holds true for this weekend.

So far the weather forecast this weekend looks pretty good with only partly cloudy skies forecast for Quincy and Hannibal.

Make sure your phone and/or cameras are charged up. Our skies could get real good this weekend.