Bring in the New Year with Marianne's Arctic Xpress. Spend Christmas or New Year in a remote Norwegian cabin. Chase auroras every night or join a day tour to see fjords, whales, eagles and an abundance of wildlife. Book Now | | | ARCTIC AURORA WATCH: Around the Arctic Circle, localized geomagnetic storming is possible on Dec. 17th and 18th as Earth passes through a minor stream of solar wind. This event will probably not register on NOAA storm scales because those scales measure global, not local activity. Locally, however, there could be some notable auroras around the poles even as the K-index remains nominally low. Free: Space Weather Alerts A BIG CORONAL HOLE TURNS TOWARD EARTH: For the third month in a row, a large hole in the sun's atmosphere is turning toward Earth. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the yawning structure on Dec. 16th: This is the same coronal hole that lashed Earth's magnetosphere with solar wind on Oct. 25-28 and again on Nov. 23-26. It is spinning around with the sun, strobing Earth lighthouse-style every ~27 days. The last two times we experienced its solar wind, intermittant G1-class geomagnetic storms and bright auroras were observed in the Arctic. A repeat performance is likely when the solar wind returns on Dec. 20-22. Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery ORDER NOW FOR CHRISTMAS DELIVERY: It's out of this world: the Sirius Space Pendant. To raise money for their space weather ballooning program, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have flown 3 dozen pendants to the edge of space–and you can have one for $79.95. The pendant comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and certifying that it has been to the stratosphere and back again. The pendants flew to the edge of space on Nov. 20, 2016, alongside an array of cosmic radiation sensors. During the flight, the sensors measured the highest radiation levels in the history of our monitoring program. After the balloon exploded, the payload parachuted back to Earth, landing in the snowy San Antonio mountains north of Tonopah, Nevada, where a student team recovered it on Nov. 22nd. The research of Earth to Sky Calculus is not supported by government grants or corporate donations. Instead, we are entirely crowd-funded. Proceeds from the sale of items like the Sirius Pendant go right back into cutting-edge student research. More edge of space Christmas gifts may be found in the Earth to Sky Store. THIS CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT HAS BEEN TO SPACE: Would you like to hang something far out from your Christmas Tree? We offer for your consideration the Space Santa Christmas ornament. Using a helium balloon, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew a dozen of these to the edge of space, and you can have one for $49.95: These ornaments have been on an adventure. En route to the stratosphere, they experienced temperatures as low as -55 C and cosmic ray dose rates more than 100x Earth normal. After the balloon exploded more than 117,000 feet high, the payload parachuted back to Earth, landing in the Eureka Valley at the edge of Death Valley National Park. Each ornament comes with a Christmas card showing the ceramic disk in the stratosphere and telling the story of its flight. The cosmic ray research of Spaceweather.com and Earth to Sky Calculus is completely crowd-funded. Everyone who sponsors a balloon flight or buys an item from the Earth to Sky store contributes to a growing body of knowledge about radiation in our planet's atmosphere. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Realtime Airglow Photo Gallery Realtime Sprite 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 Dec. 16, 2016, the network reported 17 fireballs. (9 sporadics, 3 sigma Hydrids, 2 Geminids, 2 December Leonis Minorids, 1 Comae Berenicid) 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 December 16, 2016 there were 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 | 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 12% 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." 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