POSSIBLE INTERPLANETARY SHOCK WAVE: This was not in the forecast. An interplanetary shock wave struck Earth on Sept. 14th at 2313 UT. Magnetometers in Boulder, CO, registered a sudden impulse of 30 nanoTeslas. This may be a previously unrecognized CME embedded in the solar wind. Minor G1-class geomagnetic storms are possible in the hours ahead as Earth's magnetic field reverberates from the impact. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text.
A SUNSPOT MADE IN CHINA: For a split second on Sept. 12th, the sunspot number increased by 1. The extra sunspot was made in China. "It was the Tiangong space station," explains Juan Carlos Casado, who watched the winged silhouette cross the sun from his backyard in Figueres, Spain:
China has been building Tiangong since its first core module was launched in April 2021. The growing station has more than doubled in size in the past year. With solar arrays, a robotic arm, multiple modules, and two spacecraft (Tianzhou 4 and Shenzhou 14) waiting at docking ports, Tiangong is starting to look a lot like the ISS. The ISS is still much larger, but China is catching up.
When it is completed in December 2023, Tiangong with be a Mir-class facility massing nearly 70 tons with living space for as many as 7 astronauts and even a Hubble-class telescope to view the cosmos.
Meanwhile, it's an awesome sunspot. "Tiangong is so large I had no trouble resolving it using a small telescope (15 cm aperture)," says Casado. "It was in front of the sun for only 0.6 seconds. My conventional mirrorless camera shooting in burst mode (10 images per second) caught it six times."
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THE SUNBURST X-PENDANT: It's the color of a sunburst: The Citrine X-Pendant. The students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched this one to the stratosphere onboard an cosmic ray research balloon. At the apex of the flight it floated 120,892 feet above Earth's surface--a record high for our 10-year ballooning program:
You can have it for $199.95. The citrine gemstone is framed in a 18K gold-plated swirl with a matching 16-inch chain. The students are selling these pendants to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the necklace in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.
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