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JUPITER
AND THE MOON: The Moon and Jupiter
are in conjunction tonight, only a few degrees apart.
Look for the bright pair rising in the east a few
hours after sunset. [sky
map] [photo
gallery]
CME
IMPACT: A coronal mass ejection
hit Earth's magnetic field on Oct. 31st around 1530
UT. The impact
jolted
Earth's polar magnetic field and sparked auroras
around the Arctic Circle. Frank Olsen sends this
picture from Sortland, Norway:
For a while, the auroras were bright
enough to see despite the glare of the nearly-full
Moon. "Conditions were excellent for aurora
photography," says Olsen. "I captured
the Moon with the Pleiades on top and Jupiter to
the left. And just over the mountain, Orion was
rising."
NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% to
60% chance of continued geomagnetic activity around
the poles during the next 24 hours as reverberations
from the CME impact wane.
Aurora alerts: text,
voice.
Realtime
Aurora Photo Gallery
AMAZING
ICE HALO DISPLAY: On Oct. 30th,
sky watchers around the Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, witnessed something amazing:
A complex network of luminous arcs and rings surrounded
the afternoon sun. "I've never seen anything
quite like it," says eyewitness Bill Cooke,
head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. Solar
physicist David Hathaway snapped this picture of
the display:
Image credit and copyright:
David Hathaway/NASA/MSFC
The apparition is almost certainly
connected to hurricane Sandy. The core of the storm
swept well north of Alabama, but Sandy's outer bands
did pass over the area, leaving behind a thin haze
of ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Sunlight shining
through the crystals produced an unusually
rich variety of ice
halos.
"By my count, there are two sun
dogs, a 22o halo, a parahelic circle, an upper
tangent arc, and a parry arc," says Chris Brightwell,
who also
photographed the display. "It was amazing."
"Very impressive," agreed
onlooker Kyle
Winkleman. "This was a once-in-a-decade
event for our area."
It might not be necessary to wait
another decade for a repeat performance. Some researchers
believe that superstorms will become more
common in the years ahead as a
result of climate change, creating new things
both terrible and beautiful to see overhead. Sky
watchers in the storm zone should remain alert for
the unusual.
UPDATE:
Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley comments on
the Sandy-ice halo link: "Over the last few
days there have been spectacular halo displays around
the edge of Sandy from New England to Alabama. Hathaway's
image like many others shows several very rare halo
arcs, an upper
Lowitz, helic
and Parry
supralateral."
Realtime
Space Weather Photo Gallery
Realtime
Comet Photo Gallery
Realtime
Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery
[previous years: 2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007,
2008,
2009,
2011]
