CNN news 2010-08-09
Superhero to the rescue. We know he can leap over tall buildings and pick up cars with bare hands. But, who knew that Superman could save a real family's home from foreclosure? Yeah, it looks like that's exactly what's going to happen. A New York family was in the process of packing up and moving out of their home when they discovered a rare copy of Action Comics No.1 in their basement. It's the comic book that introduced Superman to the world and it's considered the Holy Grail of comic books. It could rake in 250,000 dollars on the auction block later this month. Luckily bank officials say they're going to wait for the cash.
Eerie lights and a ghastly glow. If you live in the northern United States you may have seen the spectacular display of the Northern Lights. The celestial show has lit up skies from Montana to Maine, and it's all tied to this past weekend when the sun erupted with a mighty belch. What we're seeing now are charged particles plowing into the earth's magnetic field. All right. Let's take a closer look. CNN's Josh Levs brings us more images and probably some pretty good facts that we didn't know.
Yeah. Take a look at this. We are getting so many pictures of these Northern Lights from people that have been all over the world. We're getting a lot of them out of Norway, also some from Ontario, also some people in Michigan getting great views of them.
The basic idea here is that the sun is kind of waking up after a long slumber and its surface erupted the other day sending out this plasma, this ionized particles. What happens is these things stream down and they end up basically getting attracted to the poles of the earth, the magnetic poles. And they crash into nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere and they light up in the atmosphere. And you end up seeing pretty incredible images.
Depending where you lived, you may have had a spectacular view. This is one of the best right here. Take a look at that. In fact, we have a time lapse video. Let’s go to that video. This is from our iReporter Jesper Grone (ph). We put this together and what you can see is more than 100 different images that show what he was able to see over time. And he created a time lapse video out of it.
Now some of you might be wondering, hey, no fair. I didn't get to see it, I want to check it out. Well, guess what? I was just learning from our folks in our weather department here that some of you might be able to. We have a Google Earth image I want to you see here. It's possible that some people in the U.P, an upper peninsula, the area of Michigan, might actually get a view tonight. There could still be some remnants of this.
Also, there will be a pretty good view probably for some folks who are in parts of Europe, especially northern Europe. But definitely the best stuff that was there is taking place over the last two nights. And we're getting more and more images in. So over the coming days, our folks at iReport.com, they are going to keep filling up the list over here, sending us these spectacular photos.
Let's go through these one more time. And I will tell you, it's rare that you get to see something like this. But NASA is saying that there's more and more solar activity as the sun starts to wake up. So one thing we can watch for as the positive side of all of that in coming years, Kyra, is potentially some more beautiful Northern Lights, this aurora, when the particles go crashing through the sky, you get to see something pretty cool in the middle of the night.
That is pretty cool. Thanks, Josh.