Aurora australis chasers in Tasmania hoping for spectacular lightshow
Aurora chasers in Tasmania are on high alert with strong indications the Southern Lights will be coming on strong.
On Wednesday, NASA satellite cameras captured a massive flare shooting out from a sunspot straight towards Earth.
Sun flares are common events but this was graded as a low-end X-class flare, meaning it scraped into the most intense category.
The blast has sheared off a few billion tons of the sun's outer layer, the corona, and now this coronal mass ejection is heading towards Earth at a speed of about 4 million kilometres per hour.
In two days it will cover the 150 million kilometres distance between sun and Earth.
The material that breaches the earth's defences could generate dazzling lightshows known as auroras.
While the displays can be seen from other states, Tasmania's proximity to the magnetic south pole makes it the best place outside Antarctica to view the Southern Lights.
Magaret Sonnemann, who founded the Aurora Australis Tasmania Facebook page said this was the most promising prospect for an aurora in years.
"We haven't seen an event like this for several years and we have no idea when it might occur again," she said.
"The old hands are going to exotic locations and all the new people are asking all sorts of questions and thinking about what they are going to do."
Ms Sonnemann has seen her page grow rapidly since she started it in 2012 with membership approaching 15,000.
"There's lots of activity on the Facebook page," she said.
But she warned there were no guarantees.
In January this year, a huge X-flare prompted people to fly into Tasmania to witness an aurora but nothing happened.
"One of the exciting things about the aurora is that you just never know," she said.
"It could exceed our expectations or it could be nothing."
She said many aurora chasers would be happy to lose some sleep in hope of being rewarded.
"It is such a wonderful, amazing, outstanding experience that we're all willing to take chances just on the possibility that it might occur.
"It might be ten years before something like this happens again."
