'CANYON OF FIRE' ERUPTION WON'T HIT EARTH: A solar magnetic filament erupted on Halloween night, carving a "canyon of fire" in the sun's southern hemisphere According to a NASA model, debris from the explosion will not hit Earth. However, another source of activity is turning toward our planet. Keep reading. Aurora alerts: SMS Text
SOMETHING FLARE-Y THIS WAY COMES: Suddenly, the southeastern limb of the sun is crack ling with activity. This interest-compressed movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a cluster of M-class and near-M-class solar flares during the opening hours of Nov. 1st:
The source of the explosions is sunspot AR3477 and a magnetically-connected farside sunspot still hidden behind the edge of the sun. The blast sites will turn toward Earth in the days ahead producing a source of potentially geoeffective flares this weekend. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text
Mars sees it, too: NASA's Mars Perseverence rover looks at the sun once a day to check the air for dust. On Oct. 31st it saw a large sunspot:
Perseverence doesn't take beautiful images of the sun. It can't. The rover's MASTCAM only puts about 90 pixels across the entire solar disk. When Perseverance sees a sunspot, however, we know it must be big to register on such primitive images.
The sunspot Perseverence photographed yesterday is on the farside of the sun (as seen from Earth) at the same location as this morning's M-class solar flares. It is, in short, the flare-y thing that this way comes. In a few days we will see for ourselves. Stay tuned!
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ALASKAN TIMBER WOLF PENDANT: It's a great gift for wolf lovers. On Sept. 5th, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched this Alaskan Timber Wolf Pendant to the stratosphere onboard a cosmic ray research balloon. At the apex of the flight, it floated 103,018 ft high, above 99.7% of Earth's atmosphere.
You can have it for $99.95. The students are selling space pendants to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the wolf in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.
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