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. | | |
NASA MAKES PROGRESS WITH LOST SATELLITE: Using 5 antennas to establish contact, NASA engineers have confirmed beyond doubt that a spacecraft found earlier this month by amateur astronomer Scott Tilley is indeed IMAGE, an important space weather satellite lost since 2005. Now they are attempting to regain control. Talking to IMAGE is a challenge due to the passage of time: Types of hardware and operating systems used when IMAGE was built no longer exist, requiring significant reverse-engineering. Good luck to the engineers working on this project! IMAGE's global aurora photos and other data have been sorely missed. Free: Aurora Alerts.
LUNAR ECLIPSE OBSERVING TIPS: The full Moon is about to pass through the shadow of Earth, turning the normally gray lunar disk a lovely shade of coppery-orange. When should you look? For people in the USA, the answer is Wednesday morning, Jan. 31st, just before sunrise. This graphic prepared by Larry Koehn of ShadowandSubstance.com depicts key moments of the eclipse in the Pacific Time Zone:
Other time zones are available, too: UT, EST, CST, MST, PST, HST.
The timing of the eclipse favors western US states. The Moon will spend more than an hour inside the core of Earth's shadow--and people on the Pacific side of the country will see all of it. On the Atlantic coast, people will see only a partial eclipse or no eclipse at all.
Elsewhere in the world, the eclipse will be fully visible across the Pacific Ocean, Asia, and Australia. The eclipse will not be visible in Africa, South America, or western Europe: global map.
Did you know that climate scientists pay special attention to lunar eclipses? Dark eclipses are a sign of volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere--particles that can reflect sunlight and cool the planet. Bright eclipses, on the other hand, are a sign that the stratosphere is clear. A clear stratosphere "lets the sunshine in" to warm the planet below.
"I welcome any and all reports on the brightness of this eclipse for use in my volcano-climate studies," says Emeritus Prof. Richard Keen of the University of Colorado. "While actual brightness measurements (in magnitudes) made near mid-totality are most useful, I can also make use of Danjon-scale ratings. Please be sure to note the time, method, and instruments used in your reports." Observations may be submitted here.
Realtime Eclipse Photo Gallery
GLOWING 3D PRINTED MOON GLOBE: Looking for an over-the-Moon Valentine's gift? Consider this: On Jan. 4, 2018, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew this 3D printed Moon globe to the edge of space:
The surface of the sphere is an accurate topo-map of lunar terrain, tracing every major crater and mountain range. It is also a night light. A built-in USB-rechargeable battery provides up to 20 hours of romantic illumination. A helium-filled space weather balloon lifted this globe and several others to the stratosphere, reaching an altitude of 36.3 km (119,095 ft).
You can have one for $149.95. Each glowing orb comes with a greeting card showing the Moon in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space. Sales 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
MAKE YOUR OWN LUNAR ECLIPSE GLASSES: Do you have left-over safety glasses from last August's solar eclipse? Geologist Rik Smoody of Portland, Oregon, shows us how to turn them into lunar eclipse glasses:
LOL Rik.
That's right, you don't need special glasses to view a lunar eclipse. The shadowed Moon is painless to behold. Observers in the USA should face west in the hours before sunrise on Wednesday, Jan. 31st. The orange orb sinking toward the horizon is safe to observe with the naked eye as well as unfiltered telescopes and binoculars. Enjoy the show!
Realtime Space Weather 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 Jan. 30, 2018, the network reported 11 fireballs.
(11 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 January 30, 2018 there were 1882 potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2018 BN6 | 2018-Jan-24 | 0.9 LD | 10.3 | 16 |
2018 BG1 | 2018-Jan-24 | 10.9 LD | 7.2 | 27 |
2018 BP1 | 2018-Jan-24 | 19.2 LD | 8.2 | 43 |
2018 BA3 | 2018-Jan-24 | 3 LD | 8 | 21 |
2018 AL12 | 2018-Jan-26 | 8.1 LD | 19.6 | 37 |
2018 BM5 | 2018-Jan-26 | 4.8 LD | 9.1 | 12 |
2018 BU1 | 2018-Jan-27 | 3.1 LD | 11.3 | 43 |
2018 BQ | 2018-Jan-27 | 9.3 LD | 3.4 | 27 |
2018 BE6 | 2018-Jan-30 | 3.4 LD | 17 | 45 |
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 | 14.1 | 60 |
2018 AH12 | 2018-Feb-04 | 5.3 LD | 5 | 15 |
276033 | 2018-Feb-04 | 11 LD | 34 | 646 |
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 | 282 |
2015 DK200 | 2018-Mar-10 | 6.9 LD | 8 | 27 |
2016 SR2 | 2018-Mar-28 | 18.7 LD | 7.3 | 20 |
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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| 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 |
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