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3RD OF JULY FIREWORKS: NOAA forecasters say that G1-class geomagnetic storms are possible on July 3rd when this CME is expected to graze Earth's magnetic field. The approaching CME was hurled into space by an erupting magnetic filament in the sun's southern hemisphere. Aurora alerts: SMS Text
GREEN GHOSTS IN A GEOMAGNETIC STORM: This picture may be the first of its kind. On June 27th, photographer Tom Warner of South Dakota caught a bunch of Green Ghosts in a geomagnetic storm:
"This was a huge bucket list item for me," says Warner. "An MCS thunderstorm was moving through the area, so I set up my camera to photograph sprites. The auroras and the Green Ghosts were NOT expected!"
Everyone knows what auroras are. Green Ghosts are still new to many observers. They're the green blobs on top of the red sprites. Experienced observers say they appear in as few as 0.2% of sprite photos.
"Tom Warner's green ghost is very clear--and certainly an unusual sight combined with aurora!" says Oscar van der Velde, an upper atmospheric lightning researcher at the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya.
Green Ghosts were discovered in May 2019 by Hank Schyma, a Houston Texas-based storm chaser. Initially, researchers thought they might be a form of green airglow activated by sprites when they touched a layer of oxygen 80 to 90 km above Earth's surface. Indeed, Ghost is an acronym: "Green emissions from excited Oxygen in Sprite Tops."
New research casts doubt on that explanation. A paper recently published in Nature Communications reports a Herculean effort to decode the color of Green Ghosts. About a month after Schyma discovered the phenomenon, a team of lightning scientists led by María Passas Varo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía began chasing thunderstorms, hoping to catch a Green Ghost in the slit of their spectrograph. It wasn't easy. Green Ghosts appear unpredictably and often last for no more than a fraction of a second. Four years and 2000 spectra later, they managed to capture just one spectrum of a Green Ghost strong enough to study. The results surprised them.
Green Ghosts, it seems, are made of metal.
Spectrum of a Green Ghost over the Mediterranean in Sept. 2019. [full caption] [source]
"We identified a mix of spectral lines, including mainly iron, nickel, oxygen and nitrogen, that when combined, produced a green-yellow glow," says van der Velde, a co-author of the study. "There were also traces of sodium and silicon."
This metal-rich stew is more like meteor debris than airglow. Iron atoms deposited by meteors burning up in Earth's atmosphere peak in abundance 85 km high--about right for the tops of the tallest sprites. Green Ghosts might thus be a type of "meteor fluorescence."
Or not. These conclusions are based on just one spectrum, and Green Ghosts may be far more varied than that. Stay tuned for updates as the research continues.
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THIS PENDANT HAS TOUCHED THE SHADOW OF THE MOON: On April 8, 2024, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched a cosmic ray research balloon directly into a total eclipse of the sun. This handmade pendant went along for the ride. Floating more than 118,110 feet above the path of totality in Texas, the necklace spent 3 minutes and 45 seconds wrapped in the shadow of the Moon:
You can have it for $149.95. Created by an artist in Texas where the balloon was launched, the pendant displays a solar eclipse art print sealed under a smooth glass cover. It comes with a greeting card showing the pendant in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space during the total eclipse.
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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 Jul 01, 2024, the network reported 10 fireballs.
(9 sporadics, 1 Microscorpiid)
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 July 2, 2024 there were 2349 potentially hazardous asteroids.
 |
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: | Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
| 2024 NA | 2024-Jun-27 | 4.3 LD | 10.8 | 33 |
| 2019 NJ | 2024-Jun-27 | 17.2 LD | 10.1 | 66 |
| 415029 | 2024-Jun-27 | 17.3 LD | 25.9 | 2304 |
| 2022 MM1 | 2024-Jun-28 | 7.8 LD | 10.9 | 39 |
| 2010 XN | 2024-Jun-28 | 14.1 LD | 11.3 | 52 |
| 2024 MW | 2024-Jun-28 | 0.2 LD | 13.6 | 5 |
| 2024 MS1 | 2024-Jun-28 | 2.4 LD | 15.8 | 23 |
| 2022 HD1 | 2024-Jun-29 | 16.5 LD | 7.2 | 63 |
| 2024 MK | 2024-Jun-29 | 0.8 LD | 9.4 | 145 |
| 2017 MB3 | 2024-Jun-30 | 5 LD | 6.5 | 30 |
| 2024 JJ25 | 2024-Jun-30 | 10.5 LD | 9.4 | 117 |
| 2024 LJ2 | 2024-Jul-01 | 19.8 LD | 10.4 | 80 |
| 2022 BY39 | 2024-Jul-02 | 13.2 LD | 3 | 4 |
| 2024 LH | 2024-Jul-02 | 4.4 LD | 4.3 | 32 |
| 2024 KQ1 | 2024-Jul-04 | 14.9 LD | 6.9 | 57 |
| 2024 MT1 | 2024-Jul-08 | 3.9 LD | 18.1 | 83 |
| 2024 ME1 | 2024-Jul-10 | 11.4 LD | 8.4 | 39 |
| 2022 YS5 | 2024-Jul-11 | 11 LD | 5.8 | 38 |
| 2024 BY15 | 2024-Jul-16 | 16.2 LD | 0.7 | 16 |
| 2024 MG1 | 2024-Jul-21 | 11.1 LD | 9.3 | 55 |
| 2024 LY2 | 2024-Jul-23 | 12 LD | 7.8 | 92 |
| 2011 MW1 | 2024-Jul-25 | 10.1 LD | 8 | 120 |
| 2024 MH1 | 2024-Jul-26 | 4.7 LD | 5.8 | 27 |
| 2011 AM24 | 2024-Jul-26 | 16.8 LD | 6.2 | 281 |
| 523664 | 2024-Jul-28 | 14.9 LD | 23.7 | 680 |
| 2020 PN1 | 2024-Aug-02 | 18 LD | 5.5 | 29 |
| 2023 HB7 | 2024-Aug-05 | 14.6 LD | 6.1 | 32 |
| 2017 TU1 | 2024-Aug-05 | 10.1 LD | 10.1 | 22 |
| 2024 KH3 | 2024-Aug-10 | 14.6 LD | 11.4 | 197 |
| 2021 GY1 | 2024-Aug-16 | 17.7 LD | 6.3 | 59 |
| 2024 JV33 | 2024-Aug-19 | 12 LD | 11.1 | 213 |
| 2022 BF2 | 2024-Aug-19 | 19.7 LD | 16.4 | 91 |
| 2020 RL | 2024-Aug-27 | 12.2 LD | 8.2 | 34 |
| 2021 RA10 | 2024-Aug-28 | 6.8 LD | 4.9 | 29 |
| 2012 SX49 | 2024-Aug-29 | 11.2 LD | 4.3 | 20 |
| 2016 RJ20 | 2024-Aug-30 | 18.3 LD | 14.8 | 68 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. | | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Almost 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 sensors that detect secondary cosmic rays, a form of radiation from space that can penetrate all the way down to Earth's surface. Our monitoring program has been underway without interruption for 7 years, resulting in a unique dataset of in situ atmospheric measurements.
Latest results (July 2022): Atmospheric radiation is decreasing in 2022. Our latest measurements in July 2022 registered a 6-year low:
What's going on? Ironically, the radiation drop is caused by increasing solar activity. Solar Cycle 25 has roared to life faster than forecasters expected. The sun's strengthening and increasingly tangled magnetic field repels cosmic rays from deep space. In addition, solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays, causing sharp reductions called "Forbush Decreases." The two effects blend together to bring daily radiation levels down.
.Who cares? Cosmic rays are a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. They can alter the chemistry of the atmosphere, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. According to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan school of public health, crews of aircraft have higher rates of cancer than the general population. The researchers listed cosmic rays, irregular sleep habits, and chemical contaminants as leading risk factors. A number of controversial studies (#1, #2, #3, #4) go even further, linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.
Technical notes: 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.
Data points in the graph labeled "Stratospheric Radiation" correspond to the peak of the Regener-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 Regener 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." 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. |
| | information about sunspots based on the latest NOAA/USAF Active Region Summary |
| | current counts of failed and deployed Starlink satellites from Jonathan's Space Page. See also, all satellite statistics. |
| | Authoritative predictions of space junk and satellite re-entries |
| | from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. |
| | from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| | the underlying science of space weather |
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