Marianne's Heaven On Earth Aurora Chaser Tours Chasethelighttours.co.uk invites you to join them in their quest to find and photograph the Aurora Borealis. Experience the winter wonderland in the Tromsø Area. | | | CO-ROTATING INTERACTION REGION: NOAA forecasters estimate a 50% chance of polar geomagnetic storms on March 6th when a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) is expected to hit Earth's magnetic field. CIRs are transition zones between fast- and slow-moving solar wind streams. Solar wind plasma piles up in these regions, producing density gradients and shock waves that do a good job of sparking auroras. Aurora alerts: text or voice INDONESIA, HERE WE COME! This morning, March 4th, a team of students from Earth to Sky Calculus took off for Indonesia. Their mission: to observe a total eclipse of the sun on March 9th and to test high-altitude payloads for the Solar Eclipse Balloon Network. Here are the travelers assembled at Los Angeles International Airport prior to departure: The students are carrying space weather balloon payloads onboard the plane with them. This means they can make cosmic ray measurements during the flight. The flight path follows an arc that brushes the doorstep of the Arctic Circle: We shall see how radiation levels in the airplane increase as the flight approaches the pole! Results may be available as early as March 5th, so stay tuned. The eclipse the students are flying to observe is the only total eclipse of 2016. During the early hours of March 9th, the new Moon will pass directly in front of the solar disk, bringing night to day and revealing the sun's ghostly corona. The path of totality cuts across the Pacific Ocean, making significant landfall only on the islands of Indonesia. Larry Koehn of Shadow and Substance created this animated visibility map: Outside the narrow path of totality, the eclipse will be partial. Observers all around the Pacific will be able to see a crescent-shaped sun in the sky casting crescent-shaped shadows on the ground below. In Hawaii, 60% to 70% of the sun will be covered, quite a bit more than the 20% coverage in Alaska. The Australian sun will be as much as 50% blocked. This is the last solar eclipse before the "Big One" next year. On August 21st, 2017, the sun and Moon will line up again. This time the Moon's shadow will cross the entire USA, creating a total eclipse in easy driving distance of tens of millions of people. It will likely be the best observed eclipse in human history. Stay tuned for a preview from Indonesia. Realtime Spaceweather Photo Gallery PHYSICS OF AN EXPLODING SPACE WEATHER BALLOON: On Feb. 27th, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched a space weather balloon to measure increasing levels of cosmic rays. At the apex of the flight, the balloon exploded as planned and the radiation sensors parachuted back to Earth. A high-speed camera on top of the payload captured some extraordinary images of the pop: These images illustrate new findings about the physics of exploding balloons. In Oct. 2015, researchers Sébastien Moulinet and Mokhtar Adda-Bedia of the Ecole Normale Supérieure published a Physical Review Letter entitled "Popping Balloons: A Case Study of Dynamical Fragmentation." In it, they reported the results of a series of fun yet informative laboratory experiments in which one balloon after another was popped and analyzed. Basically, there are two ways a balloon can pop: along a single tear (the "opening regime") or along many tears (the "fragmentation regime"). This video shows the two regimes in action. Which way the balloon decided to pop depends on the stress in the rubber membrane. When the stress is low, it can be relieved with a single tear, but when the stress is high, many tears are required to do the job. Clearly, space weather balloons explode in the fragmentation regime. This is hardly a surprise. When space weather balloons are launched, they measure no more than 6 to 8 feet in diameter. By the time they reach the stratosphere, they have stretched into a sphere as wide as a house. That's a lot of tension to release! More information about this research is available from the American Physical Society. Realtime Aurora 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 Mar. 4, 2016, the network reported 6 fireballs. (6 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 March 4, 2016 there were 1682 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. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere | Situation Report -- Oct. 30, 2015 | Stratospheric Radiation (+37o N) | Cosmic ray levels are elevated (+6.1% above the Space Age median). The trend is flat. Cosmic ray levels have increased +0% in the past month. | Sept. 06: 4.14 uSv/hr (414 uRad/hr) | Sept. 12: 4.09 uSv/hr (409 uRad/hr) | Sept. 23: 4.12 uSv/hr (412 uRad/hr) | Sept. 25: 4.16 uSv/hr (416 uRad/hr) | Sept. 27: 4.13 uSv/hr (413 uRad/hr) | Oct. 11: 4.02 uSv/hr (402 uRad/hr) | Oct. 22: 4.11 uSv/hr (411 uRad/hr) | These measurements are based on regular space weather balloon flights: learn more. 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. Our measurements show that someone flying back and forth across the continental USA, just once, can absorb as much ionizing radiation as 2 to 5 dental X-rays. For example, here is the data from a flight on Oct. 22, 2015: Radiation levels peak at the entrance to the stratosphere in a broad region called the "Pfotzer Maximum." This peak is named after physicist George Pfotzer who discovered it using balloons and Geiger tubes in the 1930s. Radiation levels there are more than 80x sea level. Note that the bottom of the Pfotzer Maximim is near 55,000 ft. This means that some high-flying aircraft are not far from the zone of maximum radiation. Indeed, according to the Oct 22th measurements, a plane flying at 45,000 feet is exposed to 2.79 uSv/hr. At that rate, a passenger would absorb about one dental X-ray's worth of radiation in about 5 hours. 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 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 | |