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AURORA WATCH: Two days ago on the sun, a magnetic filament snapped. The resulting explosion hurled a CME into space and sent beautiful waves of energy surging through the sun's atmosphere. The CME might strike a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on July 23rd, sparking a mild geomagnetic storm. Northern sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
SUN SPLASH: The surface of the sun is a million times more spacious than the surface of Earth. If you scan so much terrain every day, you're bound to see some strange and unexpected things:
![](swpod2006/22jul06/Alvarez1_strip.jpg)
Photo credit: Larry Alvarez and a Coronado SolarMax90.
"There was an interesting area on the sun today that looked like the splashing of a water droplet on the surface," reports photographer Larry Alvarez of Flower Mound, Texas. "It danced about, jetting out streams of matter every 30 minutes or so."
What's next? See for yourself.
GOLDEN GATE SHADOWS: Photographer Mila Zinkova looked over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge on Thursday and saw, suspended in the swirling fog, a rainbow around her shadow: (continued below)
![](swpod2006/22jul06/zinkova_strip.jpg)
Actually, this is not a rainbow. It's a Brocken Spectre.
Brocken Spectre are caused by fine droplets of misty water--i.e., fog. The droplets catch the rays of the sun and, through some combination of reflection and diffraction, produce rings of color around the observer's shadow. Although people on bridges and mountaintops have been observing Brocken Spectre for centuries, the physics of this phenonenon is not fully understood. It's a beautiful mystery.