A major solar flare unleashed Tuesday punished Earth's protective magnetic field early Wednesday, but the planet and its high-tech communication systems appear to have largely weathered the worst of the storm. The storm shut down and possibly crippled an experimental communications satellite owned by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), officials said. The satellite, called Kodama, went into a protective safe mode this morning. It is still able to communicate but officials left open the possibility that the craft is permanently damaged. The space storm, perhaps the third most powerful on record while in space, packed the potential to have more effect than one in 1989 that knocked out power to an entire Canadian province. "This is one of the largest space weather events I've seen in 30 years," Joe Kunches, lead forecaster for NOAA's Space Environment Center, said in a telephone interview.

The brunt of the storm, a coronal mass ejection (CME), hit at around 1 a.m. EST Wednesday, reaching Earth about 19 hours after it left the Sun -- several hours sooner than expected. "This makes it one of the fastest CME's we have recorded and comes close to a record superstorm in 1859," said Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for the SOHO spacecraft, which first spotted the event.

View: Full Article | Source: space.com

I am fairly certain that I saw evidence of the Aurora Borealis last night from my home......for the first time in my life. The sky to the north was unusually bright, but the extent of this brightness was limited. At one point, I could see several stars in this bright section of sky, and more stars adjacent to this region that were in a normal, dark sky.

I am located in a town called Ulverston, in the county of Cumbria, north-west England (an area known as The Lake District). This is around 54 degrees N.

Chris Low.