SKREI-RORA BOREALIS: During the early hours of April 8th, a solar wind stream flowing from a hole in the sun's atmosphere enveloped our planet. Photographer Eric Fokke immediately saw the effect of the incoming wind as green auroras backlit the fish drying racks so common these days in Lofoton, Norway:
"Two seasons come to an end next week on the Lofoten Islands. The northern light season and the skrei (or cod) season," says Fokke. "The drying racks are full with fish and the nights are getting shorter and shorter. Both seasons were great again! One more week to go ... and the weather forecast sounds good, so we may have a nice finale!"
SPHERICAL CAMERA IN THE STRATOSPHERE: On March 26th, as part of our normal cosmic ray monitoring program, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched a Ricoh Theta S spherical camera to the stratosphere. The finicky instrument worked throughout the entire flight, resulting in this view from an altitude of 116,140 feet:
The view from a space weather balloon at 116,140 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA
Click on the image, then spin and zoom. Be sure to notice the cosmic ray payload below the camera and the 50 ft-wide balloon overhead. The black object apparently bisecting the balloon is a thermal pack attached to the camera itself; this pack helped the camera stay warm despite surrounding air temperatures as low as -63 C. A few seconds after this picture was taken, the balloon exploded and the payload parachuted back to Earth, landing in a Joshua Tree forest on the verge of Death Valley National Park.
More spherical images show the launch crew, the payload approaching the cloud deck from below, and the parachute opening in the stratosphere.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
GIANT 'ELVE' APPEARS OVER EUROPE: On April 2nd, high above a thunderstorm in the Czech republic, an enormous ring of light appeared in the night sky. Using a low-light video camera, amateur astronomer Martin Popek of Nýdek photographed the 300 km-wide donut hovering near the edge of space:
"It appeared for just a split second alongside the constellation Orion" says Popek.
This is an example of an ELVE (Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources). First seen by cameras on the space shuttle in 1990, ELVEs appear when a pulse of electromagnetic radiation from cloud-to-ground lightning propagates up toward space and hits the base of Earth's ionosphere. A faint ring of deep-red light marks the broad 'spot' where the EMP hits.
"For this to happen, the lightning needs to be very strong--typically 150-350 kilo-Ampères," says Oscar van der Velde, a member of the Lightning Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. "For comparison, normal cloud-to-ground flashes only reach 10-30 kA."
ELVEs often appear alongside red sprites, which are also sparked by strong lightning. Indeed, Popek's camera caught a cluster of sprites dancing nearby.
ELVEs are elusive--and that's an understatement. Blinking in and out of existence in only 1/1000th of a second, they are completely invisible to the human eye. For comparison, red sprites tend to last for hundredths of a second and regular lightning can scintillate for a second or more. Their brevity explains why ELVEs are a more recent discovery than other lightning-related phenomenon. Learn more about the history and physics of ELVEs here and here.