SUBSIDING CHANCE OF STORMS: Earth is exiting a stream of high-speed solar wind. As a result, the chance of magnetic storms and auroras is decreasing. NOAA forecasters say the odds of a G1-class storm on Nov. 15th are no more than 10%. Browse: aurora photo gallery.
SUPERMOON OVER ANTARCTICA (AND ELSEWHERE): Around the world, billions of people marveled at last night's supermoon. Only a handful saw it from Antarctica. B. Sudarsan Patro was one of those few, and this is the picture he took from the Bharati Indian Base Station in Antarctica's Larsemann Hills:
"We had a beautiful view of the big Moon rising above the frozen landscape," he says. "I feel so lucky to be here!"
Located 50,000 km closer to Earth, the supermoon of Nov. 14th was 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser full moons of the past. It was so bright, it did something usually reserved for the sun. It made a rainbow:
Alex Conu sends this photo from Reine in the Lofoten Islands of Norway. "I wanted to shoot the supermoon rising yesterday, but the weather was against me--or so I thought," he says. "Around 10 PM, I got a huge hole in the clouds. A shaft of moonlight shot through the gap and made a rainbow in the fjord--a supermoonbow!"
"Moonbows are identical to normal rainbows, the only difference being the light source," Conu adds. "This one was a beauty."
It was also cloudy in the French Alps when the supermoon rose. "I walked up the top of the Jura mountain to get above the clouds," says Sylvain Chapeland. "After enjoying a colorful sunset, I was surprised by an odd-looking moon, almost rectangular."
"I regularly see deformations of the moon and sun at this site when there are strong temperature inversion layers, but this one was really impressive!" says Chapeland. "Definitely worth walking 2 hours in the snow."
More views of the supermoon may be found in the realtime photo gallery:
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery