Would you like a call when things are happening in the night sky? Sign up for backyard astronomy alerts from spaceweather.com: voice or text. | | | CHANCE OF POLAR MAGNETIC STORMS: A stream of solar wind is buffeting Earth's magnetic field, sparking beautiful lights around the Arctic Circle. The display is likely to continue over the next 48 hours. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of polar geomagnetic storms on Nov. 2nd and 3rd. Aurora alerts: text, voice HYDER FLARE MISSES EARTH: Earth-orbiting satellites detected a solar flare on Nov. 1st. Usually solar flares come from sunspots, but there were no sunspots anywhere near this blast. A movie from the Solar Dynamics Observatory shows what happened: The C3-category flare was caused by a filament of magnetism, which rose up and erupted between 0400 and 0600 UT. Some of the material in the filament fell back to the sun, causing a flash of X-rays where it hit the stellar surface. That was the flare. The rest of the filament flew out into space, forming the core of a massive CME. A movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory shows the CME billowing away from the sun. NOAA analysts say it will not hit Earth. Flares like this, which happen without sunspots, are called Hyder Flares. They help keep solar activity high even when sunspot counts are low. Solar flare alerts: text, voice Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery SOLAR ACIVITY ... BY THE NUMBERS: During the last two weeks of October, the biggest sunspot in nearly 25 years, AR2192, rotated across the solar disk crackling with strong flares. Spaceweather.com reader Sean Barnes has prepared a summary of the eruptions. There were 26 M-flares, 6 X-flares and, perhaps most astronishly of all, zero Earth-directed CMEs. Click on the image below to browse the numbers in detail: The monster sunspot was remarkable for both the large number of flares it produced and the small number of CMEs. When the magnetic canopy of a sunspot explodes, it typically produces a flash of electromagnetic radiation (a solar flare) and hurls a billion-ton cloud of gas (a CME) into space. The two phenomena don't always go together, but they often do. AR2192, however, was "all flash." It produced lots of solar flares but very few CMEs--only one, in fact. No one knows why. Because AR2192 hurled zero CMEs toward Earth, our planet did not experience any geomagnetic storms during the sunspot's apparition. For aurora watchers, the Great Sunspot was actually a bit of a dud. Right now AR2192 is transiting the farside of the sun. If it does not decay too much while it is there, the sunspot could return intact to the Earthside before mid-November. Then the numbers will start increasing again. Stay tuned. Solar flare alerts: text, voice Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Realtime Eclipse Photo Gallery Realtime Comet 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 Nov. 2, 2014, the network reported 16 fireballs. (14 sporadics, 2 Northern Taurids) 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 November 2, 2014 there were 1510 potentially hazardous asteroids. 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. | 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 | | the underlying science of space weather | |