| | 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: 5.6 nT Bz: 1.1 nT north more data: ACE, DSCOVR Updated: Today at 2347 UT Coronal Holes: 11 May 17 Solar wind flowing from this coronal hole should reach Earth on May 14-15. Credit: NASA/SDO. Noctilucent Clouds The southern season for noctilucent clouds began on Nov. 17, 2016. Come back to this spot every day to see the "daily daisy" from NASA's AIM spacecraft, which is monitoring the dance of electric-blue around the Antarctic Circle. Switch view: Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica, Polar Updated at: 02-24-2017 17:55:02 SPACE WEATHER NOAA Forecasts | | Updated at: 2017 May 11 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: 2017 May 11 2200 UTC Mid-latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 10 % | 05 % | MINOR | 05 % | 05 % | SEVERE | 01 % | 01 % | High latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 15 % | 15 % | MINOR | 20 % | 15 % | SEVERE | 15 % | 15 % | | | | | | | | | | | | Lights Over lapland is excited to announce that Autumn Aurora Adventures are available for immediate booking! Reserve your adventure of a lifetime in Abisko National Park, Sweden today! | | | STEALTH CME IMPACT: A slow-moving "stealth CME" swept past Earth on May 10th. The impact was so gentle, it was almost unnoticed. However, there was a periodic disturbance in the solar wind near Earth--waves of south-pointing magnetism that slightly disturbed the geomagnetic field. No auroras were observed. Free: Aurora Alerts THE SUN IS BLANK: For the second day in a row, the sun is blank--no sunspots. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the featureless face of our star on May 11th: This marks the 32nd day in 2017 that the sun has been without spots. Cumulatively, it adds up to more than a month of blank suns--and it's only May. For comparison, it took all 12 months of 2016 for the sun to accumulate 32 spotless days. The accelerating pace of spotlessness is a sign that Solar Minimum is approaching. Solar Minimum is yin to the yang of Solar Maximum, a natural part of the sun's 11 year sunspot cycle. Contrary to popular belief, Solar Minimum is not boring ...only different. It brings a time of enhanced cosmic rays, pink auroras, a collapsing ionosphere and accumulating space junk. With action like that, who needs sunspots? Stay tuned for more blank suns. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery SPACESHIP TRANSITS THE FLOWER MOON: According to folklore, this week's full Moon is the Flower Moon. Northern spring flowers are abundant in May, and the Moon illuminates them beautifully after sunset. Last night in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, amateur astronomer Efrain Morales Rivera was photographing the bright orb when a winged spaceship flitted overhead: "It was the International Space Station (ISS)," explains Rivera, "crossing the rays of the Crater Tycho." Backlit by the Moon, the outlines of the ISS are clearly visible. The wings are solar arrays, containing a total of 262,400 solar cells. Altogether, the four sets of arrays can generate 84 to 120 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to provide power to more than 40 homes. Some of that electricity is being used to grow ... you guessed it ... flowers. The first petals of orange zinnias opened in early 2016, and the flowers are now regular participants in space gardening research. This week's Moon is the Flower Moon on the ISS, too. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery MOTHER'S DAY AT THE EDGE OF SPACE: These pendants have touched space--and returned to Earth in time for Mother's Day. On April 15, 2017, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew a payload-full of heart-shaped Venus pendants to the stratosphere onboard a high-altitude helium balloon. Here's one, 111,550 feet above the Sierras of central California: These blue jewels make great Mother's Day gifts--and you have have one for $129.95. Each glittering pendant comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its journey to the stratosphere and back again. More far-out Mother's Day gifts may be found in the Earth to Sky Store. All proceeds support atmospheric radiation monitoring and hands-on STEM education. Realtime Comet 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 May. 11, 2017, the network reported 12 fireballs. (8 sporadics, 2 eta Lyrids, 2 eta Aquariids) 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 May 11, 2017 there were 1801 potentially hazardous asteroids. | Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) | 2015 VD1 | 2017-May-07 | 18.2 LD | 10.5 | 34 | 2017 HX4 | 2017-May-08 | 3.7 LD | 11.9 | 19 | 2017 JV1 | 2017-May-08 | 2.3 LD | 11.3 | 21 | 2017 JY1 | 2017-May-09 | 8.9 LD | 8.1 | 33 | 2017 HZ49 | 2017-May-09 | 15 LD | 5.4 | 29 | 2017 HP3 | 2017-May-10 | 19.6 LD | 17.4 | 180 | 2017 JX1 | 2017-May-11 | 3.7 LD | 8 | 22 | 2017 HU49 | 2017-May-11 | 5.6 LD | 1.8 | 19 | 2017 JA2 | 2017-May-12 | 2.6 LD | 9.6 | 43 | 2017 JR1 | 2017-May-13 | 15.8 LD | 10 | 40 | 2017 JM2 | 2017-May-15 | 5.1 LD | 14.7 | 52 | 2012 EC | 2017-May-16 | 19.5 LD | 4.5 | 74 | 2017 CS | 2017-May-29 | 8 LD | 9.1 | 468 | 418094 | 2017-Jun-01 | 8 LD | 23.2 | 490 | 2017 HV4 | 2017-Jun-10 | 19.5 LD | 3.9 | 52 | 2010 VB1 | 2017-Jun-16 | 10.3 LD | 8.3 | 81 | 471984 | 2017-Jun-18 | 19.1 LD | 7.7 | 102 | 441987 | 2017-Jun-24 | 7.9 LD | 12.7 | 178 | 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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