POLAR AURORA WATCH: Earth is entering a minor stream of solar wind flowing from a hole in the sun's atmosphere. Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras mixed with bright Harvest moonlight on Oct. 6-7. Free: Aurora Alerts
MERCURY AND THE SOLAR EXPLOSION: On Oct. 6th, magnetic fields near the sun's western limb criss-crossed and exploded, sending a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) caught the expanding cloud racing past Mercury:
This CME will miss both Mercury and Earth. No geomagnetic storms are expected as a result of the explosion.
Mercury is currently on the far side of the sun, passing almost directly behind our star. Astronomers call this "superior conjunction." At closest approach on Oct. 8th, the sun and Mercury will be only a little more than half a degree apart. Humans cannot see this event because of intense sunlight. SOHO, however, can; the spacecraft uses a coronagraph to block the glare. Join SOHO for a ringside seat this weekend.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
HARVEST MOONBOW: Last night's Harvest Moon was so bright, it did something normally reserved for the sun. It made a rainbow. Yuichi Takasaka photographed the phenomenon in the spray of Skógafoss, a waterfall in the south of Iceland:
"It was a beautiful 'Harvest Moonbow'," says Takasaka. "Auroras slowing drifting overhead were an unexpected bonus."
Moonbows and rainbows form in the same way: Light reflected from water droplets spreads into an arc of beautiful color. It takes an especially bright Moon, however, to make the phenomenon visible to the human eye. Did anyone else spot a Harvest Moonbow? Submit your images here.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
SOLAR ECLIPSE IN THE STRATOSPHERE: On Aug. 21st during the Great American Solar Eclipse, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched 11 space weather balloons from the path of totality. They aimed to photograph the Moon's shadow from the stratosphere--and they succeeded. Looking down from a point more than 100,000 feet above Earth's surface, this GoPro video shows the inky-black shadow of the Moon darkening a 70-mile-wide patch of Wyoming and Nebraska:
This video was assembled and edited by filmmaker Ginger Perez, a founding student member of Earth to Sky Calculus. The payload was sponsored by the Southern Maine Community College with Maine students joining the launch team as space weather balloon "trainees."
Our next solar eclipse mission is already set: We plan to launch space weather balloons from Chile into a total eclipse on July 2, 2019. That one will be a sunset eclipse with the sun low on the horizon during the flight. The teams are looking forward to photographing the Moon's stretched-out shadow fringed by lovely sunset colors. Stay tuned for that!
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