| | Switch to: Europe, USA, New Zealand, Antarctica Credit: NOAA/Ovation Planetary K-index Now: Kp= 0 quiet 24-hr max: Kp= 2 quiet explanation | more data Interplanetary Mag. Field Btotal: 2.7 nT Bz: 2.0 nT north more data: ACE, DSCOVR Updated: Today at 2353 UT Coronal Holes: 02 Feb 18 Solar wind spilling down from this northern coronal hole could brush against Earth's magnetic field on Feb. 4th, causing mild geomagnetic storms and Arctic auroras.. Credit: SDO/AIA Noctilucent Clouds Our connection with NASA's AIM spacecraft has been restored! New images from AIM show that the southern season for noctilucent clouds (NLCs) is underway. Come back to this spot every day to see AIM's "daily daisy," which reveals the dance of electric-blue NLCs around the Antarctic Circle.. Switch view: Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica, Polar Updated at: 02-02-2018 17:55:03 SPACE WEATHER NOAA Forecasts | | Updated at: 2018 Feb 02 2200 UTC FLARE | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | CLASS M | 01 % | 01 % | CLASS X | 01 % | 01 % | Geomagnetic Storms: Probabilities for significant disturbances in Earth's magnetic field are given for three activity levels: active, minor storm, severe storm Updated at: 2018 Feb 02 2200 UTC Mid-latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 10 % | 30 % | MINOR | 01 % | 10 % | SEVERE | 01 % | 01 % | High latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 15 % | 15 % | MINOR | 15 % | 30 % | SEVERE | 15 % | 30 % | | | | | | | | | | | | Lights Over Lapland is excited to announce that we now have TWO aurora webcams covering nearly a 200° view of Abisko National Park in Sweden! Watch the auroras dance live, all season long here. | | | POLAR CROWN CORONAL HOLE: Solar wind spilling from a northern hole in the sun's atmosphere (a "polar crown coronal hole") could brush against Earth's magnetic field on Feb. 4th, possibly causing minor geomagnetic storms. Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras this weekend. Free: Aurora Alerts THE EFFECT OF OZONE ON THE LUNAR ECLIPSE: When you think of a lunar eclipse, the color that comes to mind is red. The core of Earth's shadow is reddened by atmospheric scattering, and when that shadow falls across the Moon, the lunar landscape turns as red as a sunset. Yet some observers of the Jan. 31st lunar eclipse saw a different color: blue. George Ionas sends this picture from Palmerston North, New Zealand: "A few seconds after totality ended, a soft blue band appeared," says Ionas. "Could this be the color of Earth's atmosphere projected onto the lunar surface?" That's not far off. The source of the blue band is ozone. Eclipse researcher Richard Keen, an Emeritus professor at the University of Colorado explains: "Most of the light illuminating the Moon passes through the stratosphere, and is reddened by scattering. However, light passing through the upper stratosphere penetrates the ozone layer, which absorbs red light and actually makes the passing light ray bluer." This can be seen, he says, as a turquoise-blue fringe around the red. Keen was in Hawaii for the eclipse, and he saw it, too. "The blue band was easy to see through binoculars during the last minutes of totality, although naked-eye observers might have missed it. A number of pictures submitted to Spaceweather.com do justice to the visual appearance." Browse the gallery for more ozone: Realtime Lunar Eclipse Photo Gallery UNIQUE VALENTINE'S GIFT: Nothing says "I Love You" like a Valentine's pendant from the edge of space. On Dec. 31, 2017, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew a payload-full of these heart-shaped pendants to the stratosphere, 35.1 km (115,158 feet) above Earth's surface: You can have one for $119.95. Each glittering pendant comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space. Sales of this pendant support the Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray ballooning program and hands-on STEM research. Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store All proceeds support hands-on STEM education AURORAS AND MOONSHADOWS: Everyone knows that auroras are best seen in the dark. Jan. 31st was an exception to that rule. "We witnessed a short but beautiful aurora outburst while the sky overhead was brightly lit and our shadows stretched across the ground," reports Eric Fokke of Vesterålen, Norway. Moonshadows, that is: "With the supermoon we visited our neighbors on the archipelago of Vesterålen, and we went to the beach to see the show," says Fokke. "The northern lights were visible even against that bright moon." On Jan. 31st, a solar wind stream sailed wide of Earth, barely grazing our planet's magnetic field. Surprising forecasters, the gentle graze was sufficient to spark several widely-seen episodes of green around the Arctic Circle. Lack of darkness was not a problem, after all. Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com. On Feb. 2, 2018, the network reported 20 fireballs. (20 sporadics) In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies] Potentially Hazardous Asteroids ( PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. On February 2, 2018 there were 1882 potentially hazardous asteroids. | Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) | 2018 BU1 | 2018-Jan-27 | 3.1 LD | 11.3 | 43 | 2018 BQ | 2018-Jan-27 | 9.3 LD | 3.4 | 27 | 2018 BS6 | 2018-Jan-28 | 7.2 LD | 11 | 38 | 2018 BE6 | 2018-Jan-30 | 3.4 LD | 17 | 46 | 2018 BQ6 | 2018-Jan-30 | 3.6 LD | 10.2 | 13 | 2018 AQ2 | 2018-Feb-02 | 13.4 LD | 17.4 | 130 | 2002 CB19 | 2018-Feb-02 | 10.5 LD | 15.6 | 36 | 2018 BN5 | 2018-Feb-03 | 15.9 LD | 9.4 | 23 | 2018 BG3 | 2018-Feb-03 | 11.9 LD | 14.2 | 60 | 2018 AH12 | 2018-Feb-04 | 5.3 LD | 5 | 15 | 276033 | 2018-Feb-04 | 11 LD | 34 | 646 | 2018 BP6 | 2018-Feb-05 | 3.7 LD | 13.7 | 42 | 2018 BL1 | 2018-Feb-09 | 16.5 LD | 20.3 | 72 | 2015 BN509 | 2018-Feb-09 | 12.9 LD | 17.7 | 257 | 1991 VG | 2018-Feb-11 | 18.4 LD | 2.1 | 7 | 2014 WQ202 | 2018-Feb-11 | 15.1 LD | 19.8 | 62 | 2016 CO246 | 2018-Feb-22 | 15.3 LD | 5.4 | 21 | 2017 DR109 | 2018-Feb-24 | 3.7 LD | 7.4 | 11 | 2016 FU12 | 2018-Feb-26 | 13.2 LD | 4.5 | 15 | 2014 EY24 | 2018-Feb-27 | 14.8 LD | 8 | 54 | 2015 BF511 | 2018-Feb-28 | 11.7 LD | 5.7 | 39 | 2003 EM1 | 2018-Mar-07 | 16.6 LD | 8 | 45 | 2017 VR12 | 2018-Mar-07 | 3.8 LD | 6.3 | 280 | 2015 DK200 | 2018-Mar-10 | 6.9 LD | 8 | 27 | 2016 SR2 | 2018-Mar-28 | 18.7 LD | 7.3 | 20 | 2010 GD35 | 2018-Mar-31 | 15.5 LD | 11.6 | 45 | 2004 FG29 | 2018-Apr-02 | 4 LD | 14.9 | 22 | Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere | Readers, thank you for your patience while we continue to develop this new section of Spaceweather.com. We've been working to streamline our data reduction, allowing us to post results from balloon flights much more rapidly, and we have developed a new data product, shown here: This plot displays radiation measurements not only in the stratosphere, but also at aviation altitudes. Dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x. These measurements are made by our usual cosmic ray payload as it passes through aviation altitudes en route to the stratosphere over California. What is this all about? Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 13% since 2015: Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation. The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners. The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Reneger-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today. | The official U.S. government space weather bureau | | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. | | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. | | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory | | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | the underlying science of space weather | | Reviews here can help you to pick up best memory foam mattresses. | | These links help Spaceweather.com stay online. Thank you to our supporters! | | | | | | | | | | | | ©2017 Spaceweather.com. All rights reserved. This site is penned daily by Dr. Tony Phillips. | |