WAITING FOR THE STORM CLOUD: A CME that left the sun on April 30th has still not reached Earth. Forecasters raised the possibility of a glancing blow on May 3rd, but so far there is no sign of the advancing solar storm cloud. Either the CME missed or it might make a late arrival on May the 4th, sparking minor geomagnetic activity. Free: Aurora Alerts
METEORS FROM HALLEY'S COMET: This week Earth is passing through a broad stream of debris from Halley's Comet, source of the annual eta Aquarid meteor shower. Specks of ancient dust from the comet are disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere producing a drizzle of shooting stars. Eliot Herman photographed this one streaking over Tucson, Arizona, before sunrise on May 3rd:
"With clear skies this week, the hunt for eta Aquarids is on," says Herman. "This photo is from an all night series of fisheye images taken with a Nikon D810 at 15 sec each, ISO 3200."
Forecasters expect the shower to peak on May 5th and 6th with 10 to 30 meteors per hour visible from the northern hemisphere, and twice that number from the southern hemisphere. No matter where you live, the best time to look is during the dark hours before local sunrise when the constellation Aquarius is rising in the east.
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.