Lights Over lapland is excited to announce that Autumn Aurora Adventures are available for immediate booking! Reserve your adventure of a lifetime in Abisko National Park, Sweden today! | | |
AURORAS DURING THE PERSEID METEOR SHOWER? NOAA forecasters say there is a 40% chance of minor geomagnetic storms on Aug. 12th when a solar wind stream is expected to hit Earth's magnetic field. This could provide a shimmering green backdrop for photos of Perseid meteors at high latitudes. The G1-class storm, if it occurs, would happen just as the meteor shower is peaking. Free: Aurora Alerts
PERSEID FIREBALLS THIS WEEKEND: Earth is passing through a stream of debris from huge Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. If forecasts are correct, the shower will peak this weekend, and it should be rich in fireballs. A fireball is a very bright meteor, at least as bright as Jupiter or Venus. NASA research shows the Perseid meteor shower produces more fireballs than any other meteor shower. Piotr Majewski photographed this specimen disintegrating over Grodztwo, Poland, exactly one year ago:
"The annual Perseid maximum is about to begin," says Majewski. "We're going to need a lot of fireballs like this one to see the shower in bright moonlight."
Indeed, lunar interference will be a problem. Glare from a waning gibbous Moon will wipe out all but the brightest Perseids during the hours before dawn when the shower is usually most active. Fortunately, Perseids are the 'fireball champions' of annual meteor showers. Here are the data:
Since 2008, the Perseids have produced more fireballs than any other annual meteor shower. The Geminids are a close second, but they are not as bright as the Perseids. For reasons having to do with the speed and composition of their meteoroids, Geminid fireballs are on average about a magnitude fainter than those in the Perseids.
Observing tips: This weekend, keep an eye on the sky between the hours of 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM local time. Before midnight the meteor rate will start out low, then increase as the night wears on, peaking before sunrise when the constellation Perseus is high in the sky. For every bright fireball that streaks out of Perseus, there will be dozens more ordinary meteors struggling to be seen in the moonlight. Place yourself in the moon shadow of a tall building to improve their visibility. Sky maps: Aug. 11, 12, 13.
Realtime Meteor Photo Gallery
SOLAR ECLIPSE PENDANTS: Would you like to support our Solar Eclipse Balloon Network? Here's one way: Buy a space pendant. This solar eclipse-themed necklace flew to the stratosphere on July 2, 2017, attached to the payload of an Earth to Sky Calculus space weather balloon:
The payload contained more just like it. If you buy one now for $89.95, we will fly it back to the stratosphere during the Great American Solar Eclipse on August 21, 2017, where it will be enveloped by the Moon's cool shadow above our launch site in Oregon. No additional charge! Just make a note in the COMMENTS BOX of the shopping cart: "Please fly my pendant into the eclipse!" Each pendant comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its journey to the stratosphere and back again.
More items from the edge of space may be found in the Earth to Sky Store. All proceeds support atmospheric radiation monitoring and hands-on STEM education.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All proceeds support hands-on STEM education
WEIRD WAYS TO OBSERVE THE SOLAR ECLIPSE: During the Great American Solar Eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017, only a narrow slice of the USA will experience totality--the magical moment when the disk of the Moon completely covers the sun. The rest of the country will see a partial eclipse. The sun, still blindingly bright, will turn into a crescent as the Moon passes in front of it off-center. How do you safely observe this phenomenon? Believe it or not, you probably already own a solar eclipse viewer. It's in your kitchen. John Stetson of Maine demonstrates:
"It's a vegetable steamer," explains Stetson. "During the eclipse on the 21st, sunbeams projected through holes in the steamer will appear as crescents."
"The Chinese were the first to record the use of pinhole projection to observe eclipses in 500 BCE," he adds. "At the beginning of Western Civilization, Aristotle also wrote about this phenomenon."
Looking through his kitchen in Brisbane, Australia, Duncan Waldron found something else that works. "Try a water biscuit," he suggests. "With smaller holes, you'll see more detail of the bright crescent Sun."
This proves that you have have your eclipse and eat it, too.
Anything with pinholes or tiny gaps can serve this purpose. Colanders are ideal. Even a tree will do the trick. Sunbeams lancing through gaps in the leafy canopy form crescent shaped spots on sidewalks and other surfaces. "Here is my son, Charley, standing behind a bush on June 10, 2002 during a partial eclipse," says Stetson. "Crescents may be seen projected onto his shirt."
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Realtime Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery
Realtime Aurora 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 Aug. 11, 2017, the network reported 42 fireballs.
(26 sporadics, 15 Perseids, 1 alpha Capricornid)
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 August 11, 2017 there were 1803 potentially hazardous asteroids.
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Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2017 NB7 | 2017-Aug-06 | 6.9 LD | 6 | 80 |
2017 OF7 | 2017-Aug-10 | 19.2 LD | 8.2 | 86 |
2014 OA339 | 2017-Aug-13 | 12.3 LD | 10 | 47 |
2017 PE | 2017-Aug-24 | 19.5 LD | 7.1 | 46 |
3122 | 2017-Sep-01 | 18.5 LD | 13.5 | 5376 |
2014 RC | 2017-Sep-11 | 15.1 LD | 8.9 | 16 |
1989 VB | 2017-Sep-29 | 7.9 LD | 6.3 | 408 |
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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