Aurora borealis could make return visit to Northern Nevada on Friday night

A large swath of the continental United States, including much of Nevada, was treated to a rare appearance of the northern lights on Thursday evening.

Northern Nevadans far from city lights could have another chance to witness the spectacle on Friday night.

The surge in the aurora borealis phenomenon is due to a coronal mass ejection from the sun on Tuesday, Oct. 8, according to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center . The coronal mass ejection sends plasma mass from the sun outward into the earth's magnetosphere, which can cause aurorae to be visible far from the north and south poles.

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“The underlying cause for this activity is decreasing as it passes over Earth, something called the coronal mass ejection, or CME for short,” Shawn Dahl, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center Service Coordinator, told USA TODAY. “What that is a discharge and explosion of solar material and strong magnetic fields, and in this case, this happened the evening of the 8th of October and it arrived in force yesterday morning here."

The northern lights on Thursday were seen as far south as central Arizona and southern Utah .

While NOAA's aurora dashboard predicts the northern lights to dip as far south as northern Idaho and Montana, Nevadans far from light pollution still could see a glow on the horizon on Friday night.

"The aurora does not need to be directly overhead but can be observed from as much as 1,000 km (about 620 miles) away when the aurora is bright and if conditions are right," according to NOAA statement.

The Reno-Sparks area is about 670 miles from the northern tip of Idaho.

Though it's historically rare to see the northern lights this far south, Nevadans can expect to see them more in the next year. NOAA and NASA say that we're approaching the peak an 11-year Solar Cycle in 2025 .

This article originally appeared on Reno Gazette Journal: Aurora borealis could make return visit to Northern Nevada on Friday night