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SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids
 
Solar wind
speed: 421.1 km/sec
density: 11.4 protons/cm3
more data: ACE, DSCOVR
Updated: Today at 2345 UT
X-ray Solar Flares
6-hr max: A7
1735 UT Sep16
24-hr: A7
1735 UT Sep16
explanation | more data
Updated: Today at: 2300 UT
Daily Sun: 16 Sep 19
The sun is blank--no sunspots. Credit: SDO/HMI

Sunspot number: 0
What is the sunspot number?
Updated 16 Sep 2019

Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 13 days
2019 total: 182 days (70%)
2018 total: 221 days (61%)
2017 total: 104 days (28%)
2016 total: 32 days (9%)
2015 total: 0 days (0%)
2014 total: 1 day (<1%)
2013 total: 0 days (0%)
2012 total: 0 days (0%)
2011 total: 2 days (<1%)
2010 total: 51 days (14%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
2008 total: 268 days (73%)
2007 total: 152 days (42%)
2006 total: 70 days (19%)

Updated 16 Sep 2019


Thermosphere Climate Index
today: 4.12
x1010 W Cold
Max: 49.4
x1010 W Hot (10/1957)
Min: 2.05
x1010 W Cold (02/2009)
explanation | more data: gfx, txt
Updated 16 Sep 2019

The Radio Sun
10.7 cm flux: 69 sfu
explanation | more data
Updated 16 Sep 2019

Current Auroral Oval:
Switch to: Europe, USA, New Zealand, Antarctica
Credit: NOAA/Ovation
Planetary K-index
Now: Kp= 2 quiet
24-hr max: Kp= 4
unsettled
explanation | more data
Interplanetary Mag. Field
Btotal: 2.0 nT
Bz: -1.1 nT south
more data: ACE, DSCOVR
Updated: Today at 2345 UT
Coronal Holes: 16 Sep 19


Solar wind flowing from this southern coronal hole could graze Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 17-18.
Credit: SDO/AIA

Noctilucent Clouds The northern season for noctilucent clouds has ended. NASA's AIM spacecraft is no longer detecting electric-blue clouds around the Arctic Circle.
Switch view: Europe, USA, Asia, Polar
Updated at: 09-03-2019 13:55:02 UT
SPACE WEATHER
NOAA Forecasts
Updated at: 2019 Sep 16 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: 2019 Sep 16 2200 UTC
Mid-latitudes
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
ACTIVE
15 %
20 %
MINOR
05 %
05 %
SEVERE
01 %
01 %
High latitudes
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
ACTIVE
15 %
15 %
MINOR
20 %
25 %
SEVERE
20 %
25 %
 
Monday, Sep. 16, 2019
What's up in space
       
 

Special Offer: SAVE 600nok per person. Book a combo aurora borealis chase and scenic day tour during the months of September, October or November 2019 for the special price of 1800 kr. Check Marianne's webpage for details!

 

ARCTIC AURORA WATCH: A stream of solar wind flowing from a southern hole in the sun's atmosphere could graze Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 17-18. Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras mixed with gibbous moonlight when the gaseous material arrives. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.

IT MUST BE SEPTEMBER: Studies show that September is one of the very best months for auroras. At this time of year around the Arctic Circle, the lights often appear for no apparent reason. That's exactly what happened last night. With no geomagnetic storm to provoke a display, one appeared anyway:

Jani Ylinampa took the picture from Rovaniemi, Finland. "These were quite bright auroras, lighting up the sky even with the nearly full Moon as competition," says Ylinampa. "This was the best show of the season so far, without exaggeration!"

What supercharges the auroras of September? It's called the "Russell-McPherron effect," named after the researchers who first explained it. During weeks around equinoxes, cracks open in Earth's magnetic field. Solar wind pours in and fuels unexpected displays of aurora borealis. Stay tuned for even more as the actual equinox approaches on Sept. 23rd. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.

Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Free:
Spaceweather.com Newsletter
  

THIS IS NOT A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION: Fortunately, not everything is as it seems. In San Francisco, CA, Friday the 13th ended with a mushroom cloud on the horizon. It was not a nuclear explosion. "It was a sunset mirage," explains Mila Zinkova, who photographed the phenomenon:

"Friday the 13th was a hot, calm day in San Francisco," says Zinkova. "The horizon was relatively clear and we could see mirages of ships and distant lands from the beach. This made me decide to film the sunset."

Good decision. Warm air, strong temperature gradients, and at least one temperature inversion sliced the image of the setting sun into multiple distorted layers. Briefly, the sun assumed the form of a mushroom cloud, followed by an astonishing rectangular sun. But the best was yet to come.

"The sunset ended with a high green flash," says Zinkova.

This was rare indeed. Most green flashes occur right at the sea surface. This one, however, was suspended high above waters. A strong kink in the temperature gradient thousands of feet above sea level magnified usually small differences in refraction between red and green light, creating a "floating green flash."

"The last miraged image of the sun melted into the sunset sky more than 2 minutes after the predicted time of sunset, which shows how strong and anomalous the refraction was," says Zinkova. "If there were no atmospheric extinction, I probably would have been able to see the miraged sun for another few minutes." Zinkova's full video of the event may be found here.

Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter

CRYSTAL STARSHIP ENTERPRISE: Last month, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched the starship Enterprise to the stratosphere. Riding onboard a high-altitude cosmic ray balloon, the laser-etched crystal spaceship traveled 34.7 km (113,845 feet) above Earth's surface:

You can have it for $149.95. The students are selling the Enterprise to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each starship comes with a greeting card showing the item in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space. Also included is a multi-colored LED illuminated stand (shown in the picture above). This creates a colorful visual effect and allows the Enterprise to be used as a far-out night light.

Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education


Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Free:
Spaceweather.com Newsletter
  

  All Sky Fireball Network
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. 16, 2019, the network reported 15 fireballs.
(14 sporadics, 1 Sept. epsilon Perseid)

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]

  Near Earth Asteroids
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 16, 2019 there were 2015 potentially hazardous asteroids.
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:
Asteroid
Date(UT)
Miss Distance
Velocity (km/s)
Diameter (m)
2019 RX2
2019-Sep-12
7.2 LD
5.3
7
2019 RJ1
2019-Sep-12
10.8 LD
10.4
15
2010 RM82
2019-Sep-13
18.2 LD
14.6
23
2013 CV83
2019-Sep-13
16.1 LD
13.1
62
504800
2019-Sep-14
13.9 LD
14.4
155
2019 RT
2019-Sep-14
13.7 LD
16.6
50
2019 RQ2
2019-Sep-14
9.4 LD
17.2
29
467317
2019-Sep-14
13.9 LD
6.4
389
2019 JF1
2019-Sep-16
11.2 LD
4.3
62
2018 FU1
2019-Sep-16
18.4 LD
4.7
16
2019 RC
2019-Sep-16
17.4 LD
15.1
158
2019 RP2
2019-Sep-20
8.5 LD
1.6
6
2017 SL16
2019-Sep-21
7.9 LD
6.5
25
2017 SM21
2019-Sep-21
11.5 LD
9.6
20
2019 RE2
2019-Sep-21
19.7 LD
8.7
38
2019 RB3
2019-Sep-21
19 LD
11.8
51
2019 QZ1
2019-Sep-22
12.5 LD
8.2
77
523934
2019-Sep-24
10.9 LD
22.3
257
2019 QY3
2019-Sep-26
13.9 LD
8.4
41
2017 KP27
2019-Sep-26
4.2 LD
4.7
25
2006 QV89
2019-Sep-27
18.1 LD
4.1
31
2018 FK5
2019-Oct-01
13.3 LD
10.5
8
2018 LG4
2019-Oct-02
13.8 LD
8.1
12
2017 TJ4
2019-Oct-05
13.5 LD
8.9
32
2019 RK
2019-Oct-08
16.7 LD
3.1
32
162082
2019-Oct-25
16.2 LD
11.2
589
2017 TG5
2019-Oct-25
14.4 LD
11.9
34
2015 JD1
2019-Nov-03
12.9 LD
11.9
269
2010 JG
2019-Nov-12
19.6 LD
14.9
235
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

SOMETHING NEW! We have developed a new predictive model of aviation radiation. It's called E-RAD--short for Empirical RADiation model. We are constantly flying radiation sensors onboard airplanes over the US and and around the world, so far collecting more than 22,000 gps-tagged radiation measurements. Using this unique dataset, we can predict the dosage on any flight over the USA with an error no worse than 15%.

E-RAD lets us do something new: Every day we monitor approximately 1400 flights criss-crossing the 10 busiest routes in the continental USA. Typically, this includes more than 80,000 passengers per day. E-RAD calculates the radiation exposure for every single flight.

The Hot Flights Table is a daily summary of these calculations. It shows the 5 charter flights with the highest dose rates; the 5 commercial flights with the highest dose rates; 5 commercial flights with near-average dose rates; and the 5 commercial flights with the lowest dose rates. Passengers typically experience dose rates that are 20 to 70 times higher than natural radiation at sea level.

To measure radiation on airplanes, we use the same sensors we fly to the stratosphere onboard Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloons: neutron bubble chambers and X-ray/gamma-ray Geiger tubes sensitive to energies between 10 keV and 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.

Column definitions: (1) The flight number; (2) The maximum dose rate during the flight, expressed in units of natural radiation at sea level; (3) The maximum altitude of the plane in feet above sea level; (4) Departure city; (5) Arrival city; (6) Duration of the flight.

SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: 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 18% since 2015:

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.

En route to the stratosphere, our sensors also pass through aviation altitudes:

In this plot, 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.

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.

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.

  Essential web links
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
  The official U.S. government space weather bureau
Atmospheric Optics
  The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena.
Solar Dynamics Observatory
  Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever.
STEREO
  3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
  Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO.
Daily Sunspot Summaries
  from the NOAA Space Environment Center
NOAA 27-Day Space Weather Forecasts
  fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong.
Aurora 30 min forecast
  from the NOAA Space Environment Center
Heliophysics
  the underlying science of space weather

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