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AURORA WATCH: On June 7th or 8th, Earth will run into a solar wind stream flowing from a large coronal hole on the sun. Sky watchers in Alaska and Canada should be alert for auroras.
STRANGE CLOUDS: On Friday night, June 2nd, sky watchers in the United Kingdom witnessed a vivid display of electric-blue noctilucent clouds. Paul Evans took this picture from Larne, Northern Ireland:
Noctilucent clouds (NLCs) are a mystery: They float through the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere at the very edge of space. Some scientists think the clouds are seeded by space dust and fed by rocket exhaust. Others suspect they're a sign of global warming. Later this year, NASA plans to launch a satellite named AIM to investigate.
Friday night's display marks the beginning of the 2006 NLC season, which stretches from now until the end of northern summer. Click here for observing tips and a gallery of recent sightings.
SUNNY BEACH: Newly-emerging sunspot group 892 looks a lot like a Pacific island chain--only the islands are as big as Earth and they're made of seething magnetic force fields. Like any good islands, they have lovely white beaches:
Each of the spots in this chain is surrounded by a magnetic froth called plage, French for beach. Cameran Ashraf of Claremont, CA, took the picture yesterday; it's tinted blue because he used a solar telescope tuned to the violet glow of solar calcium. Hot calcium, it turns out, is a good tracer of sunspot beaches.
more images: from Greg Piepol of Rockville, Maryland; from Larry Alvarez of Flower Mound, Texas.