THE FULL HUNTER'S MOON: This weekend's full Moon has a special name: The Hunter's Moon. Like the Harvest Moon of September, this full moon rises soon after sunset, adding extra hours of light to waning northern days. It gets its name from Native American hunters who once tracked their prey by autumn moonlight, stockpiling food for the winter ahead. Browse: Photo Gallery
A BIT OF DRAMA ON THE SUN: The sun is in the pits of perhaps the deepest Solar Minimum of a century. There are no sunspots, no solar flares, no coronal mass ejections. Nevertheless, yesterday, "I saw a bit of drama on the sun," reports Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York:
"It was so nice to wake up to a good sized solar prominence adorning the otherwise placid solar disk," says Friedman, who took the picture using an H-alpha solar telescope in his backyard.
The drama was even greater in Trenton, Florida. There, amateur astronomer Martin Wise was watching the same prominence when a jet airplane flew by. With action like this, who needs sunspots?
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
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SAN FRANCISCO SUNSET: This week, tinder-dry winds strafed parts of California, causing widespread power outages and localized wildfires. As the sun went down on Friday afternoon, Oct. 11th, that hot wind combined with cool autumn air and sun-warmed waters to create a strange display off the coast of San Francisco. Watching from the beach, Mila Zinkova photographed the sun apparently puffing from the smokestack of a cruise ship:
"The shape-shifting sun was strongly miraged," says Zinkova. "At one point it seemed to connect with the exhaust plume of a ship steaming into the west."
The flattened, layered shape of the sun was caused by the refracting effect of the low atmosphere. A mish-mash of temperature inversions and thermal gradients split the sun into multiple layers, squashing some and flipping others, creating a truly bizarre sunset. "Here's a video I made of the entire event," says Zinkova.
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FROSTY THE SPACE TOILET: How do you go to the bathroom in space? The space toilet, of course. On Oct. 6, 2019, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched this unique ornament to the stratosphere (108,893 feet altitude) onboard one of their cosmic ray balloons:
You can have it for $99.95. The students are selling edge of space ornaments to support their cosmic ray balloning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the item in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space and back again. And just imagine how good Frosty will look on your Christmas tree.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education