SpaceWeather.com Archive — Fri, Aug 5, 2022

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AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS FILLING IN FOR SDO: Images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) are temporarily unavailable as technicians rush to repair a broken fiber optic cable linking SDO's White Sands ground station to Stanford University. This is a major outage.

Meanwhile, amateur astronomers are photographing the sun and seeing several new sunspots. Here is a montage from Pepe Manteca of Barcelona, Spain:

"This morning I was shooting AR3068, but it looked very different compared to the latest SDO images," says Manteca. "Then I read on spaceweather that there is a breakdown with the data from SDO, and I saw in my telescope that there are three new sunspots."

These sunspots did not exist (or were invisible) when SDO's cable broke on August 3rd, highlighting the importance of continued monitoring by amateur astronomers. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text.

BLUE JET LIGHTNING SIGHTED OVER TEXAS: Seeing one blue jet is rare. Photographer Matthew Griffiths just caught several of them over the Big Bend National Park in Texas. "This is by far the best," he says:

Above: A blue jet emerges from a thunderhead in Big Bend National Park, photographed by Matthew Griffiths in Marfa, Texas: more.

Griffiths is an amateur photographer, primarily interested in wildlife and the Milky Way. "On July 28th, I was starting a five night West Texas road trip to capture the Milky Way," he says. "But with thunderstorms in the distance I decided to try for red sprites instead."

He ended up photographing the sprite's elusive cousin, the blue jet. First recorded by cameras on the space shuttle in 1989, blue jets are part of a growing menagerie of cloudtop "transient luminous events" such as sprites, ELVES and green ghosts. They are all elusive, but blue jets may be the hardest of all to catch.

"We're not sure why ground-based observers see them so rarely," says Oscar van der Velde of the Lightning Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. "It might have something to do with their blue color. Earth's atmosphere naturally scatters blue light, which makes them harder to see. Blue jets might be more common than we think."

A rookie mistake might have helped Griffiths. "This is only my second time trying for sprites. I might have aimed my camera too close to the cloud tops where bright lightning washed out the sprites; in fact, I couldn't find any sprites in my photos. But I think my camera angle was just right for catching the bright blue jet."

Above: A zoomed-in view showing the jet's sharp lance-like core and a diffuse fan of electric-blue overhead.

Blue jets might look like lightning, but they are not the same. Normal lightning carves a scorching-hot path through the atmosphere, heating the air to 30,000 degrees Celsius. Blue jets are made of cold plasma akin to gas inside a fluorescent light bulb. You could touch one with your hand and it might not hurt.

And, of course, they go up instead of down. Photos taken from the International Space Station (ISS) show that blue jets reach astonishing altitudes, as high as 170,000 feet. This is high enough to touch the ionosphere, possibly forming a new and poorly understood branch of Earth's global electrical circuit.

"Also," says van der Velde, "there can be considerable production of NOx and ozone by these discharges, potentially affecting the chemistry of the upper atmosphere."

Clearly, it is important to study blue jets. Photographers, now you know where to look.

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LIMITED EDITION MIRROR SPOCK: In 1967, a transporter accident sent Mr. Spock into a parallel universe, swapping the science officer of the Enterprise with his evil twin. We just found him ... in the stratosphere. Here is "Mirror Spock" floating 108,551 feet high onboard an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray research balloon:

You can have him for $170.10 (the serial number of the Enterprise divided by 10). Inspired by the classic "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek first broadcast on Oct. 6, 1967, this 8" statue is made of high-quality polystone resin and expertly painted. It comes with a greeting card showing Spock in flight and a certificate of authenticity.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, only 1000 limited edition Mirror Spock statues were manufactured and sold at sci-fi conventions in 2016. We've collected a few of these rarities to fly to the stratosphere. Get yours now.