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. | | |
SLIGHT CHANCE OF MAGNETIC STORMS: NOAA forecasters say there is a 25% chance of minor G1-class geomagnetic storms on Feb. 4-5 when a stream of solar wind sails north of Earth, possibly grazing our planet's magnetic field. Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras tonight. Free: Aurora Alerts
ACTION ON THE SUN'S EASTERN LIMB: A new sunspot is rotating into view over the sun's eastern limb, and it has announced itself with a flurry of B- and C-class solar flares. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught one of the explosions coinciding with the liftoff of a giant magnetic filament at 19:58 UT on Feb. 4th:
These flares are relatively weak and would probably escape notice during a more active phase of the solar cycle. However, we are now on the eve of Solar Minimum. C-class flares, albeit "weak," are sharp departures from months of tomb-like quiet on the solar surface.
Extreme UV radiation from these flares are causing minor waves of ionization in Earth's upper atmosphere. Otherwise, the explosions have not been geoeffective. Stay tuned for updates as the sunspot turns toward Earth.
Realtime Aurora 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
PARASELENIC CIRCLES: When the Moon is full and it's really cold outside, strange things can happen in the sky. Consider the following: "Jan 31st was a very chilly night about, -24 C and with a windchill about -34 C," reports Sheila Wiwchar of Kaleida, Manitoba. "Stepping outside to look at the Moon, I saw something I've never seen before: One halo circling the Moon and another one cutting right through it."
"I photographed this strange double halo using a Canon 6D with a Sigma lens at 10mm--lots of vignetting, but I was able to fit in both halos," she says.
Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains the apparition: "These are ice halos, formed by plate-shaped crystals in high clouds."
"The halo circling the moon is the familiar 22 degree halo," he says. "The circle through the Moon and around the sky is much more rare. It is a paraselenic circle, named after after Selene, the Greek goddess of the Moon and one of the ancient Titans. The equivalent around the sun is the parhelic circle after Helios, the personification of the sun and also a Titan."
Paraselenic circles aren't the only strange thing that happened ion Jan. 31st. Millions of people also witnessed a total eclipse of the Moon. Browse the photo gallery for moonshots.
Realtime Lunar Eclipse 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. 4, 2018, the network reported 17 fireballs.
(17 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 4, 2018 there were 1882 potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2018 BE6 | 2018-Jan-30 | 3.4 LD | 17 | 46 |
2018 BQ6 | 2018-Jan-30 | 3.6 LD | 10.2 | 12 |
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 | 43 |
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.
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