 | | Switch to: Europe, USA, New Zealand, Antarctica Credit: NOAA/Ovation Planetary K-index Now: Kp= 0 quiet 24-hr max: Kp= 2 quiet explanation | more data Interplanetary Mag. Field Btotal: 3.1 nT Bz: 1.1 nT north more data: ACE, DSCOVR Updated: Today at 2346 UT Coronal Holes: 03 May 17  There are no large coronal holes on the Earth side of the sun. Credit: NASA/SDO. Noctilucent Clouds The southern season for noctilucent clouds began on Nov. 17, 2016. Come back to this spot every day to see the "daily daisy" from NASA's AIM spacecraft, which is monitoring the dance of electric-blue around the Antarctic Circle. Switch view: Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica, Polar Updated at: 02-24-2017 17:55:02 SPACE WEATHER NOAA Forecasts | | Updated at: 2017 May 03 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: 2017 May 03 2200 UTC Mid-latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 30 % | 15 % | MINOR | 10 % | 05 % | SEVERE | 01 % | 01 % | High latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 15 % | 15 % | MINOR | 30 % | 20 % | SEVERE | 40 % | 20 % | | | |  | | | | | | | | 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! | | | MINOR MAGNETIC STORM POSSIBLE TODAY: A filament of magnetism on the sun exploded on April 30th, hurling a CME into space. NOAA analysts say the cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on May 3rd with a 40% chance of minor geomagnetic storms following the impact. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras, especially in the southern hemisphere where darkening autumn skies favor visibility. Free: Aurora Alerts HYPERBOLIC COMET JOHNSON: Discovered in November 2015 by Jess Johnson of the Catalina Sky Survey, Comet Johnson (C/2015 V2) is now swinging through the inner solar system on a hyperbolic orbit. A "hyperbolic orbit" means the sun's gravity will probably fling the comet into deep space later this year. Now is the time to look. Amateur astronomer Rolando Ligustri used a remotely controlled telescope in New Mexico to photograph the comet on May 1st:  Ligustri's 2 x 10 minute exposure with a 4-inch telescope reveals the comet's green nucleus and its double tail. The longer of the two is the filamentary ion tail, made of gas carried directly away from the sun by the solar wind. The shorter protuberance is the bright dust tail, made of dusty-rocky grains sprinkled like crumbs along the comet's orbit. Comet Johnson's nucleus is green because it contains diatomic carbon (C2) a substance that glows with a verdant hue in the near vacuum of space. This comet is not visible to the naked eye, but as it approaches Earth for a 0.81 AU close encounter in early June, it is brightening to ~6th magnitude, making it an easy target for backyard telescopes. Northern hemisphere observers are favored in early May, when the comet dwells in the constellation Hercules; in late May and June, Comet Johnson races toward southern skies, where observers south of the equator can watch the comet continue its journey toward the sun. Resources: sky maps, 3D orbit, magnitudes. Realtime Comet Photo Gallery DONALD DUCK MIRAGE: Sunset photographers witness many different kind of mirages as the solar disk sinks below the waves: the inferior mirage, the Etruscan vase mirage, the green flash. On May 2nd, Marcella Giulia Pace of Marina di Ragusa, Sicily, witnessed something new. Behold, the Donald Duck mirage:  "What can I say?" says Pace. "It looked like a duck!" The technical name for this well-known apparition is "mock mirage." It occurs when one or more temperature inversion layers form above the water's surface. These layers cut the sun into horizontal slices, each slice stressed or compressed according to the refractive properties of the inversion layer. In this case, it turned the sun into a Disney character. Sometimes, mock mirages end with a series of green and blue flashes. Read more about them here. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery THESE PENDANTS HAVE TOUCHED SPACE: These pendants have touched space--and returned to Earth in time for Mother's Day. To support their cosmic ray monitoring program, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew a payload-full of jewelry to the stratosphere onboard a high-altitude helium balloon. Here's one of the pendants 113,200 feet above the Sierras of central California:  These necklaces make great Mother's Day gifts--and you have have one for $89.95. Each glittering pendant comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its journey to the stratosphere and back again. More far-out Mother's Day gifts may be found in the Earth to Sky Store. All proceeds support atmospheric radiation monitoring and hands-on STEM education. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Realtime Aurora 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. 3, 2017, the network reported 18 fireballs. (12 sporadics, 4 eta Aquariids, 1 eta Lyrid, 1 April rho Cygnid) 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 3, 2017 there were 1799 potentially hazardous asteroids.  | Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) | 2017 HW2 | 2017-Apr-27 | 9.2 LD | 9.1 | 18 | 2017 FE157 | 2017-Apr-29 | 18.4 LD | 8.6 | 63 | 2017 HK1 | 2017-May-05 | 16.9 LD | 2.6 | 38 | 2015 VD1 | 2017-May-07 | 18.2 LD | 10.5 | 34 | 2012 EC | 2017-May-16 | 19.5 LD | 4.5 | 74 | 2017 CS | 2017-May-29 | 8 LD | 9.1 | 468 | 418094 | 2017-Jun-01 | 8 LD | 23.2 | 490 | 2010 VB1 | 2017-Jun-16 | 10.3 LD | 8.3 | 81 | 471984 | 2017-Jun-18 | 19.1 LD | 7.7 | 102 | 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 12% 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 | | 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. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | a proud supporter of science education and Spaceweather.com | | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! 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