THE SOLAR WIND IS HERE: Earth is entering a stream of solar wind flowing from a hole in the sun's atmosphere. So far the gentle action of the stream has not caused significant geomagnetic activity. Nevertheless, minor geomagnetic storming is possible later today as the solar wind velocity increases to forecast values of 500+ km/s. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.
PARTIAL ECLIPSE OF THE THUNDER MOON: There's going to be an eclipse tomorrow--a partial eclipse of the Moon. On July 16th, the full Moon will pass through the shadow of our planet, off center. This movie created by space artist Larry Koehn shows how 65% of the lunar disk will fall into darkness:
The 3-hour eclipse reaches maximum coverage at 21:32 UT, timing which favors observers in Africa, the Middle East and eastern Europe. North Americans will see none of the eclipse--only a normally bright full Moon. Check NASA's visibility map to find out if you are in the eclipse zone.
According to folklore, this full Moon is the "Thunder Moon," named after the booming electrical storms of July. Tomorrow observers will find out if 65% of a Thunder Moon is still a boomer. This is the last significant lunar eclipse until May 2021, so catch it if you can!
Eclipse photos: Spaceweather.com's Realtime Photo Gallery is temporarily down following a hardware failure on our image server. Repairs are underway. Meanwhile, if you have a picture of the eclipse, please email it directly to Dr. Tony Phillips. Please don't forget to mention your full name, location, time, and impressions of the event.
Realtime Eclipse Photo Gallery
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LOCATED--THE RAINBOW BRIDGE: Many people look for the rainbow bridge. This weekend, Göran Strand found it in Östersund, Sweden:
"I photographed this very low rainbow following a local bridge in a nice way," says Strand.
What made the 'bow so low? It's simple geometry. The center of every rainbow is directly opposite the sun in the sky. A high sun makes a low rainbow.
"In this case, the sun was 38° high in the sky," says Strand. "Because the primary rainbow has a radius of 42°, only 4° of the rainbow was above the horizon--almost perfectly overlapping the bridge. Higher up in the sky you can see a fainter rainbow," he adds. "That's the secondary rainbow, it has an radius of 51°."
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
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"ONE SMALL STEP"--ORIGINAL SPACE PAINTING: This artwork has touched space. Hand-painted by artist Dana Wilcher, a student member of Earth to Sky Calculus, "One Small Step" flew to the stratosphere on June 23, 2019, onboard a cosmic ray balloon. It shows Neil Armstrong's iconic footprint on the Moon made during the Apollo 11 mission 50 years ago:
You can have it for $99.95. The students are selling these commemorative Apollo 11 paintings to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing and to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each signed 4x4inch canvas panel comes with a greeting card showing the painting in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space and back. This makes a great gift for any enthusiast of space exploration.
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