When is the best time to see auroras? Where is the best place to go? And how do you photograph them? These questions and more are answered in a new book, Northern Lights - a Guide, by Pal Brekke & Fredrik Broms. | | |
LUNAR ECLIPSE: Mark your calendar: On Oct. 8th, the Moon will pass through the shadow of Earth for a total lunar eclipse. Sky watchers in the USA will see the Moon turn a beautiful shade of celestial red and maybe turquoise, too. [full story]
STUDENTS MEASURE 'FORBUSH DECREASE': On Sept. 12th, a CME hit Earth's magnetic field, igniting the most intense geomagnetic storm of the year. The students of Earth to Sky Calculus quickly launched a helium balloon to the stratosphere to see what effect the storm was having on Earth's upper atmosphere. They expected to measure more radiation than usual. Instead, they measured less. This plot shows a sharp drop in high-energy radiation on Sept. 12th compared to previous flights in May, June, and August:
What caused this counterintuitive drop? Answer: When the CME swept past Earth, it swept aside many of the cosmic rays that normally surround our planet. The effect is called a "Forbush Decrease," named after physicist Scott E. Forbush who first described it in the 20th century.
Wherever CMEs go, cosmic rays are deflected by magnetic fields inside the CME. Forbush decreases have been observed on Earth and in Earth orbit onboard Mir and the ISS. The Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have experienced them, too, beyond the orbit of Neptune. Now high school students have detected a Forbush Decrease in the stratosphere using little more than an insulated lunchbox and a helium balloon.
The balloon's lunchbox-payload is shown here suspended more than 100,000 feet above the Sierras of central California:
Inside the payload, there was an ionizing radiation sensor (energy range: 10.0 KeV to 20.0 MeV), a cryogenic thermometer, multiple GPS altimeters and trackers, and three cameras. During the 2.5 hour flight, the buoy collected more than 50 gigabytes of video and science data ranging in altitude from 8500 ft to 113,700 ft above sea level. The analysis is still underway.
The students wish to thank Caisson Biotech LLC for sponsoring this flight. Note their logo on the upper right corner of the payload!
Readers, if you would like to sponsor an upcoming balloon launch and have your logo flown to the edge of space, please contact Dr. Tony Phillips to make arrangements. The cost of sponsorship is $500. Sponsors receive a complete video of the flight along with advertising exposure on spaceweather.com.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
LAVA LIGHTS vs. NORTHERN LIGHTS: Iceland's largest volcano is restless. The Bardarbunga volcano system, located under the massive Vatnajoekull glacier, has been rocked by hundreds of tremors daily since mid-August. Lava is currently spewing from fissures, prompting fears of a much larger eruption. Local photographers, meanwhile, are having a great time recording a rare mix of lava-red and aurora-green in the night sky:
Thorsten Boeckel sends this photo from Mývatn, Iceland. "The red shine of the fissure eruption together with the green aurora provided a phantastic view," he says.
A full-fledged eruption of this volcano has the potential to be even more disruptive than the 2010 eruption of nearby Eyjafjallajokull, which threw air traffic into chaos across Europe. According to the Icelandic Met Office, there are no signs of decreasing magma output as of Sept. 17th. This means more lava is in the offing--along with more phantastic photo-ops as aurora season unfolds around the Arctic Circle. Stay tuned to the photo gallery for visual updates. Aurora alerts: text, voice
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Realtime Comet 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 Sep. 18, 2014, the network reported 6 fireballs.
(6 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 September 18, 2014 there were 1500 potentially hazardous asteroids.
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. | 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 |
| the underlying science of space weather |