SPOTLESS SUN HURLS A CME TOWARD EARTH: Yesterday, Nov. 30th, a filament of magnetism in the sun's southern hemisphere erupted, hurling a CME into space. NOAA analysts say the expanding cloud has an Earth-directed component. The slow-moving CME could deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field on Dec. 5th, possibly sparking polar geomagnetic storms. Free: Aurora Alerts.
GEOMAGNETIC STORMS EXPECTED THIS WEEKEND: NOAA forecasters say there is a 70% chance of minor G1-class geomagnetic storms on Dec. 1st and 2nd when a stream of solar wind is expected to hit Earth's magnetic field. The gaseous material is flowing from a wide hole in the sun's atmosphere:
This is a "coronal hole"--a place where the sun's magnetic field opens up and allows solar wind to escape. We've seen this coronal hole before. It opened in June and, since then, it has been spinning around with the sun, lashing Earth with solar wind about once a month. The last time it happened on Nov. 4th, auroras were sighted in US states including Wyoming, Montana, Iowa, Washington, North Dakota and, of course, Alaska. It could happen again this weekend. Free: Aurora Alerts.
APOLLO 8 EDGE OF SPACE ORNAMENT: Fifty years ago this Christmas Eve, astronauts in the Apollo 8 command module snapped one of the most famous pictures of the Space Age: Earth rising above the cratered surface of the Moon. To celebrate, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have flown an Apollo 8 Christmas ornament to the stratosphere:
You can have one for $59.95. They make great gifts for space fans and are a far-out addition to any Christmas tree. Each ornament comes with a greeting card showing the ceramic disk in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.
This ornament traveled 109,354 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California, which had just received a blanket of snow from an early-season winter storm. During the flight it experienced temperatures as low as -65 C, air pressures only 0.2% of sea level, and cosmic ray dose rates 100x Earth-normal.
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