Where's Saturn? Is that a UFO--or the ISS? What's the name of that
star? Get the answers from mySKY--a
fun new astronomy helper from Meade. AURORA
WATCH: High-latitude sky watchers should
be alert for auroras
tonight. A high-speed solar wind stream is buffeting Earth's magnetic
field and this could spark a geomagnetic storm.
SOLAR CYCLE 24 BEGINS:
Solar physicists have been waiting for the
appearance of a reversed-polarity sunspot to signal the start of
the next solar cycle. The wait is over. Yesterday,
a magnetically reversed sunspot emerged at solar latitude 30 N,
shown in this photo taken by Greg Piepol of Rockville, Maryland:
Photo details: Coronado
SolarMax90 CaK, Lumenera SKYnyx 2-2 CCD
For reasons explained in a recent Science@NASA
story, this marks the beginning of Solar Cycle 24 and the first
step toward a new solar maximum. Intense solar activity won't begin
right away. Solar cycles usually take a few years to build from
solar minimum (where we are now)
to Solar Max (expected in 2011 or 2012). It's a slow journey, but
we're on our way!
more images: from
John Nassr of Baguio, Philippines; from
Cai-Uso Wohler of Bispingen, Germany.
QUADRANTID
METEORS: On Friday morning, Jan. 4th, the
skies above Guffey, Colorado, were streaked with meteors. Chris
Peterson caught 46 of them with his all-sky camera at the Cloudbait
Observatory:
Click
to view fireball videos
"All were brighter than 1st magnitude,"
says Peterson, "and a number of these meteors were fireballs
(brighter than magnitude -4)."
The source of the display: near-Earth asteroid 2003
EH1. Every year in early January, Earth passes through a stream
of dust trailing the asteroid, giving rise to the annual Quadrantid
meteor shower. Studies of these early-January showers suggest
that 2003 EH1 is not really an asteroid, but rather the largest
fragment of a comet that broke apart circa 1490 AD. Debris from
the breakup drifted toward our planet for ~500 years and now appears
in the form of Quadrantid
meteors.
Comet
17P/Holmes Photo Gallery
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