SOLAR MINIMUM CONDITIONS ARE IN EFFECT: The sun is spotless again. For the 133rd day this year, the face of the sun is blank.To find a year with fewer sunspots, you have to go back to 2009 when the sun was experiencing the deepest solar minimum in a century. Solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun's atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras. Free: Aurora Alerts.
LIGHTNING AND AURORAS: You don't see this every day--at least, not in Indiana. On Sunday morning, Aug. 26th, Hongming Zheng trained his camera on an electrical storm passing through West Lafayette. Just as a lightning bolt jumped across a gap in the clouds, a patch of green appeared in the background:
"It was the aurora borealis," says Zheng. "I took the picture around 3:33am as an unexpected geomagnetic storm brought Northern Lights down to Indiana--a rare sight at 40°N. Unfortunately, a full moon washed out most of the aurora. Otherwise it would have been a spectacular green and red glow against a black sky."
The geomagnetic storm started on Aug. 25th when a coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field, opening a crack in our planet's magnetosphere. Solar wind poured in to fuel auroras seen from the Arctic Circle to Indiana. Not bad for solar minimum.
RARE ICE HALOS OVER SYDNEY: Today something unusual happened in the sky above Sydney, Australia. The rising sun was preceded by a network of luminous curls, circles and arches. "It was a very rare display," says Adriano Massatani who photographed the sunrise:
These luminous forms are called ice halos, because they caused by sunlight shining through icy crystals in cirrus clouds. Usually ice halos are simple, like a solitary pillar or an uncomplicated ring. In this case, however, a complex assortment of halos criss-crossed the sky. In Massatani's photo, we see a circumzenithal arc, an upper tangent arc, an upper suncave Parry arc, a 22-degree halo, a 46 degree halo, a supralateral arc, and a pair of sundogs.
That's not all. "Later, I also saw a complete parhelic circle--something I have been hoping to see for years," says Massatani.
The variety of halos Massatani witnessed was caused by a corresponding variety of ice crystals with rare gem-like perfection and unusually precise crystal-to-crystal alignment. What are the odds? No one knows. Certainly, though, it was a lucky day in Sydney.Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
IRIDESCENT SPACE PYRAMID: Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have been traveling around the world launching cosmic ray balloons to map Earth's radiation field. This runs up a big helium bill. To help pay it, we sent this iridescent crystal pyramid to the stratosphere:
You can have it for $149.95. The students are selling this pyramid and several others like it to fund the Earth to Sky ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the pyramid in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space. All sales support hands-on STEM research.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education