On the night of May 10, 2024, the aurora came to people who had never seen it and never expected to. A pink and green curtain fell over the southern United States, down into Mexico and the Caribbean, and millions of people walked outside, held up their phones, and caught it. It was the first extreme G5 storm in twenty one years and, because nearly everyone now carries a camera, it became the most photographed aurora in the history of the world. If you remember a night the sky turned colors, this is probably the one.
What happened
The storm is named for Jennifer Gannon, a space weather scientist who died shortly before it, and the name has stuck to the event. Its source was an enormous sunspot region, many times the width of the Earth, that turned to face us in early May. Over several days it fired off a series of powerful flares and plasma clouds, and those clouds merged on the way out and arrived together.
When the pile up struck the Earth's magnetic field on May 10, forecasters raised the alarm to the top of the scale, a G5. The last time the world had seen one was the Halloween Storms of 2003.
How far south it reached
The aurora spilled far past its usual home. It was seen across the southern United States, into Mexico, Florida and Puerto Rico, and reports came from near the equator and from the southern hemisphere as well. For a huge share of the people who saw it, it was the first aurora of their lives.
What it disrupted
The Gannon Storm was also a quiet lesson in how much we now depend on things the storm can touch. The precise GPS signals that steer modern farm equipment were degraded right in the middle of the spring planting season, and tractors across the farm belt lost their guidance. Satellite internet service was knocked down in quality. Grid operators watched their systems carefully and rode it out without a major blackout, but the margins were a reminder, not a reassurance.
Why it matters
Gannon was a genuine extreme storm, and it was gentle compared to Carrington or even 1921. It still reached into farming, satellites and the grid. It proved the appetite too. The whole planet stopped and looked up on the same night. That is the opening the next great storm will arrive through, and the difference between watching it and being caught out by it is simply knowing it is coming.
How we know
Gannon is the best observed great storm ever, watched by a fleet of spacecraft and ground instruments and by hundreds of millions of people with cameras. Its flares, its plasma clouds, its global aurora and its disruptions are all documented in detail, which makes it the clearest modern picture of what a G5 looks like from the ground up.
Catch the next one from your own sky.
Most people heard about Gannon the next morning, after it was over. The next G5 will arrive with little warning, usually on a work night. Magna Earth keeps the auroral oval under watch over your exact coordinates and tells you the hour it crosses into your sky, so you are outside under it rather than scrolling photos of the night you missed.
Know the night it reaches you — from $14/mo