Lights Over lapland is excited to announce that Autumn Aurora Adventures are available for immediate booking! Reserve your adventure of a lifetime in Abisko National Park, Sweden today! | | |
SOLAR EXPLOSION MISSES EARTH: Yesterday, May 30th, a dark filament of magnetism tore through the sun's atmosphere. The explosion hurled a cloud of plasma into space, but the coronal mass ejection (CME) will not hit Earth. It is flying east of the sun-Earth line. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded this movie of the blast. Free: Aurora Alerts
NIGHT-GLOWING CLOUDS SIGHTED: Noctilucent cloud (NLC) season is underway. Northern sky watchers are beginning to spot electric-blue tendrils of light creeping over the horizon at sunset. Adrien Mauduit photographed these specimens on May 26th from Ordrup, Sjælland, Denmark:
"They were visible until about 2 in the morning," says Mauduit. Follow-up reports of NLCs have been received from Latvia (May 27th) and Northern Ireland (May 31st).
NLCs are Earth's highest clouds. Seeded by meteoroids, they float at the edge of space more than 80 km above the planet's surface. The clouds are very cold and filled with tiny ice crystals. When sunbeams hit those crystals, they glow electric-blue.
Noctilucent clouds are a summertime phenomenon. In the northern hemisphere, they usually appear in late May, then blossom in June and July as ice crystals multiply in the mesosphere high overhead. Here is an example of fully developed NLCs photographed last summer in Sweden:
Photo credit: Ruslan Merzlyakov of Umeå, Sweden. August 7, 2016
Interestingly, NLCs haven't always been here. They first appeared in the 19th century after the eruption of super-volcano Krakatoa. At the time, people thought the clouds were caused by the eruption, but long after Krakatoa's ash settled, the clouds remained. In those days, NLCs were a polar phenomenon confined mainly to the Arctic. In recent years they have intensified and spread with sightings as far south as Utah and Colorado. Some researchers believe the intensification is a sign of climate change.
Observing tips: Look west 30 to 60 minutes after sunset when the sun has dipped 6o to 16o below the horizon. If you see luminous blue-white tendrils spreading across the sky, you may have spotted a noctilucent cloud.
Realtime Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery
CALIFORNIA AURORAS: Compared to many other photos of the May 28th geomagnetic storm, which were visually spectacular, this one might not seem noteworthy. Except for one thing: It was taken in California.
"I saw the magnetic storm alert at 11:00pm," says photographer Dan McBride. "When the K-index hit 7, I left my house and drove for 1 1/2 hours to the helipad at Big Hill Lookout, west of Lake Tahoe. I could barely see it, but after my first test shot I knew I had just caught purple pillars from California at latitude 38.8 degrees N."
Auroras in California are rare and remarkable. They are visible to the naked eye typically no more than a few times a decade. The May 28th display was even more remarkable considering the phase of the sunspot cycle: The sun is rapidly plunging toward Solar Minimum. Sunspots are scarce and solar flares are weak at best. Nevertheless, we just experienced a strong geomagnetic storm. The CME that sparked auroras over California this weekend was hurled toward Earth by a seemingly minor magnetic reorganization in the sun's atmosphere.
And so space weather continues--no sunspots required. Free: Aurora Alerts
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
SPACE BEARS MAKE GOOD GRADUATION GIFTS: Around the USA, high school seniors are preparing to receive their diplomas. Nothing says "you're on your way up!" better than a graduation gift from the Edge of Space. On May 25th, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew a family of "graduation grizzlies" 27 km (90,000 feet) above Earth's surface:
Outfitted with space helmets and a diploma, the intrepid Ursidae survived cosmic rays, ultra-low temperatures, and the near-vacuum of the stratosphere. For $49.95 you can have one of these bears along with a unique Graduation card showing the bears floating at the top of Earth's atmosphere. Buy one now.
Sales of the bears support student space weather research. In fact, the bears pictured above were hitchhiking on a payload equipped with radiation sensors. We send the sensors to the stratosphere every week to monitor increasing levels of cosmic rays. Visit the Earth to Sky store to support this crowd-funded research.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All proceeds support hands-on STEM education.
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 May. 31, 2017, the network reported 3 fireballs.
(3 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 May 31, 2017 there were 1803 potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2017 KK32 | 2017-May-26 | 8.9 LD | 11.3 | 16 |
2017 CS | 2017-May-29 | 8 LD | 9.1 | 468 |
2017 KJ27 | 2017-May-30 | 6.1 LD | 16.2 | 29 |
2017 KW31 | 2017-May-31 | 1.2 LD | 10.8 | 17 |
418094 | 2017-Jun-01 | 8 LD | 23.2 | 490 |
2017 KX4 | 2017-Jun-01 | 15.2 LD | 9.4 | 47 |
2017 KJ3 | 2017-Jun-03 | 11.1 LD | 11.3 | 47 |
2017 KJ5 | 2017-Jun-04 | 11.6 LD | 3.7 | 16 |
2017 KK27 | 2017-Jun-04 | 15.7 LD | 6.5 | 28 |
2017 KR27 | 2017-Jun-06 | 7 LD | 12.6 | 67 |
2017 KQ27 | 2017-Jun-06 | 1 LD | 10.7 | 25 |
2017 HV4 | 2017-Jun-10 | 19.5 LD | 3.9 | 50 |
2017 KF3 | 2017-Jun-11 | 12.9 LD | 11.2 | 41 |
2010 VB1 | 2017-Jun-16 | 10.3 LD | 8.3 | 81 |
471984 | 2017-Jun-18 | 19.1 LD | 7.7 | 102 |
441987 | 2017-Jun-24 | 7.9 LD | 12.7 | 178 |
2017 BS5 | 2017-Jul-23 | 3.2 LD | 5.8 | 54 |
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 |
Readers, thank you for your patience while we continue to develop this new section of Spaceweather.com. We've been working to streamline our data reduction, allowing us to post results from balloon flights much more rapidly, and we have developed a new data product, shown here:
This plot displays radiation measurements not only in the stratosphere, but also at aviation altitudes. 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. These measurements are made by our usual cosmic ray payload as it passes through aviation altitudes en route to the stratosphere over California.
What is this all about? 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 13% since 2015:
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.
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.
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.
| The official U.S. government space weather bureau |
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| 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory |
| Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. |
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