| | Switch to: Europe, USA, New Zealand, Antarctica Credit: NOAA/Ovation Planetary K-index Now: Kp= 1 quiet 24-hr max: Kp= 3 quiet explanation | more data Interplanetary Mag. Field Btotal: 3.1 nT Bz: -0.7 nT south more data: ACE, DSCOVR Updated: Today at 2354 UT Coronal Holes: 20 Feb 18 There are no large and coherent coronal holes on the Earth-facing side of the sun. Credit: SDO/AIA Noctilucent Clouds Our connection with NASA's AIM spacecraft has been restored! New images from AIM show that the southern season for noctilucent clouds (NLCs) is underway. Come back to this spot every day to see AIM's "daily daisy," which reveals the dance of electric-blue NLCs around the Antarctic Circle.. Switch view: Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica, Polar Updated at: 02-07-2018 17:55:05 SPACE WEATHER NOAA Forecasts | | Updated at: 2018 Feb 20 2200 UTC FLARE | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | CLASS M | 01 % | 01 % | CLASS X | 01 % | 01 % | Geomagnetic Storms: Probabilities for significant disturbances in Earth's magnetic field are given for three activity levels: active, minor storm, severe storm Updated at: 2018 Feb 20 2200 UTC Mid-latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 25 % | 30 % | MINOR | 10 % | 15 % | SEVERE | 01 % | 05 % | High latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 20 % | 15 % | MINOR | 30 % | 30 % | SEVERE | 30 % | 40 % | | | | | | | | | | | | All-inclusive Northern Lights trips in Tromsø, Norway. Small groups, big experiences! Highly qualified guides ensure unique and unforgettable adventures with a personal touch. Visit Explore the Arctic | | | EXITING THE SOLAR WIND STREAM: Earth is exiting a stream of solar wind that sparked a G1-class geomagnetic storm on Feb. 19th. Intermittent polar auroras should continue for the next 24 to 48 hours as the solar wind speed declines back to nominal levels. Monitor the aurora gallery for sightings. Free: Aurora Alerts THE ROADSTER AND THE STAR CLUSTER: Elon Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster is doing things no electric car has ever done before. On Feb. 6th it left Earth onboard a Falcon Heavy Rocket. On Feb. 8th it crossed the orbit of the Moon. Yesterday, the Roadster paid a visit to a star cluster: "I captured this series of photos from my cozy home office in New Jersey using a remote-controlled 0.5-meter telescope at the Chilescope observatory a few hours north of Santiago, Chile," says Michael Keith. "The Roadster was at a distance of 3.7 million km from Earth--a new record! Although it is was very dim (about magnitude 19.8) I wanted to try to capture it because it was close in the sky to a nice globular star cluster: NGC 5694 is much farther away than the Tesla Roadster, alnost 115,000 light years from Earth." Since NASA published orbital elements for the Roadster on Feb. 8th, amateur astronomers have been tracking the electric car, with groups leapfrogging over one another in an effort to capture the most distant photo of this unique spacecraft. Among photos submitted to Spaceweather.com, Keith's is the record holder. For reference, 3.7 million km is almost 10 times farther from Earth than the Moon. This record will surely fall as astrophotographers around the world continue tracking the interplanetary Roadster. Whether anyone can take a more beautiful photo than Keith did, however, remains unknown. Stay tuned! Realtime Tesla Roadster Photo Gallery THE EVENING STAR IS BACK: This weekend, sky watchers admiring the crescent Moon saw something else they hadn't seen in a while: Venus. The 2nd planet is returning to the evening sky after an 11-month absence. David Blanchard photographed the "Evening Star" beaming trough the rosy glow of sunset over Grand Canyon National Park on Feb. 16th: "The crescent Moon and Venus shone brightly above the South Rim of the Grand Canyon," says Blanchard. "A short sequence of images of the setting crescent Moon show distortion of the lower limb from atmospheric effects." This is just the beginning for Venus. The planet is emerging from the glare of the sun, becoming easier to see every night, and it will be an increasingly bright fixture of the evening sky for the next 8 months. This animation created by Larry Koehn of ShadowandSubstance.com previews the action. A date of special note is March 18, 2018. Less than one month from now, Venus, Mercury and the whisper-thin crescent Moon will gather in the sunset sky for a beautiful triple conjunction: sky map. Mark your calendar! Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery RETURN OF THE EASTERNAUTS: Easter is coming early this year: April 1, 2018. Hence the return of the Easternauts. To support their cosmic ray monitoring program, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have flown a payload-full of bunnies to the edge of space: You can have one for $49.95. (Space helmet included!) They make great Easter gifts for young scientists, and all proceeds support STEM education. Each bunny comes with a greeting card showing the Easternaut in flight and telling the story of its journey to the stratosphere and back again. Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store All proceeds support hands-on STEM education 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 Feb. 20, 2018, the network reported 9 fireballs. (9 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 20, 2018 there were 1882 potentially hazardous asteroids. | Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) | 2018 CT3 | 2018-Feb-14 | 14.6 LD | 14.8 | 94 | 2018 CF3 | 2018-Feb-14 | 11.1 LD | 8.7 | 17 | 2018 CS2 | 2018-Feb-14 | 14.8 LD | 5.7 | 28 | 2018 CY2 | 2018-Feb-14 | 18.7 LD | 15 | 126 | 2018 CU2 | 2018-Feb-15 | 2.2 LD | 8.9 | 9 | 2018 CB1 | 2018-Feb-15 | 9.7 LD | 11.4 | 28 | 2018 CC1 | 2018-Feb-15 | 14.1 LD | 15.4 | 71 | 2018 CD3 | 2018-Feb-15 | 0.9 LD | 7.6 | 7 | 2018 CX2 | 2018-Feb-16 | 17.3 LD | 13.9 | 28 | 2018 CP2 | 2018-Feb-19 | 6.1 LD | 11.3 | 51 | 2018 CJ | 2018-Feb-20 | 9.3 LD | 15.3 | 67 | 2018 DB | 2018-Feb-20 | 2.3 LD | 16.2 | 11 | 2018 CU13 | 2018-Feb-21 | 11.8 LD | 10.7 | 21 | 2016 CO246 | 2018-Feb-22 | 15.3 LD | 5.4 | 21 | 2017 DR109 | 2018-Feb-24 | 3.7 LD | 7.4 | 11 | 2018 CE14 | 2018-Feb-24 | 5.2 LD | 10.2 | 26 | 2016 FU12 | 2018-Feb-26 | 13.2 LD | 4.5 | 15 | 2018 DA | 2018-Feb-26 | 11 LD | 12.8 | 51 | 2014 EY24 | 2018-Feb-27 | 14.8 LD | 8 | 54 | 2018 CU14 | 2018-Feb-27 | 5.4 LD | 4.3 | 9 | 2015 BF511 | 2018-Feb-28 | 11.7 LD | 5.7 | 39 | 2018 DC | 2018-Mar-03 | 9.3 LD | 8.2 | 42 | 2003 EM1 | 2018-Mar-07 | 16.6 LD | 8 | 45 | 2017 VR12 | 2018-Mar-07 | 3.8 LD | 6.3 | 286 | 2018 BK7 | 2018-Mar-09 | 10.2 LD | 8.7 | 69 | 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 | 363599 | 2018-Apr-12 | 19.3 LD | 24.5 | 224 | 2014 UR | 2018-Apr-14 | 9.3 LD | 4.4 | 17 | 2016 JP | 2018-Apr-20 | 12 LD | 12.7 | 204 | 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. | 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 | | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | the underlying science of space weather | | Reviews here can help you to pick up best memory foam mattresses. | | These links help Spaceweather.com stay online. Thank you to our supporters! | | | | | | | | | | | | ©2017 Spaceweather.com. All rights reserved. This site is penned daily by Dr. Tony Phillips. | |