ANOTHER CME IS COMING (MAYBE TWO): Yesterday, two magnetic filaments erupted on the sun. Both produced CMEs, one aimed at Earth, the other off-target. A direct hit + a possible glancing blow on Aug. 12th could produce high-latitude auroras mixed with Perseid meteors. CME impact alerts: SMS Text
EXPLODING COMET MCNAUGHT: There's an exploding comet in the morning sky. Comet 220P/McNaught was a nondescript speck of 17th magnitude in late May when it suddenly multiplied in brightness 7000-fold. It was fading back toward obscurity when, on Aug. 5th, it exploded again. The second outburst (650x) propelled the comet to 7th magnitude, an easy target for binoculars and small telescopes.
This is what it looks like now:
"We observed the comet in outburst on August 8th," say photographers Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger, who used a 12-inch robotic telescope in Namibia. "It has a shock wave front (the leading edge of the Aug. 5th debris shell plowing outward through the older coma)."
The comet is in the constellation Cetus near the star Mu Ceti, best seen around 4 AM local time. Its expanding atmosphere is already wider than 7 arcminutes--a quarter the size of a full Moon--with a short tail pointing away from the sun.
Some observers are comparing 220P to Comet 17P/Holmes, which famously exploded in 2007. Holmes brightened a million times, becoming a naked-eye object that you could watch expand from night to night without a telescope. "Mini-Holmes" might be a better name for 220P, although the resemblance is undeniable.
After the first outburst in May, telescopes monitoring 220P's debris found it rich in gas. Some astronomers suspect a fragment broke off the nucleus, exposing fresh ice to sunlight. If so, more explosions may be in the offing. The comet is near its minimum distance from the sun (a 1.64 AU perihelion on June 14th) and still being exposed to disruptive solar heat.
If only one more fragment falls off, you won't even need binoculars.
more images: from Ismael Civera of Villatoya, Spain; from Mike Olason of Tucson, Arizona; from Rafael Etges of Huntsville, ON Canada
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CAMPO DEL CIELO METEORITE PENDANT: This meteorite came from space. We sent it back again. The students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched it to the stratosphere onboard a cosmic ray research balloon, more than 109,620 feet above the Sierra Nevada near Bishop, CA:
You can have it for $299.95. Encased in a sterling silver cage, this is a genuine iron-nickel Campo del Cielo meteorite from Argentina. It landed on Earth 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, and made the return trip on Aug. 1, 2026. This pendant comes with a Certificate of Authenticity and a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight.
The students are selling space pendants to pay the helium bill for their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its trip to the stratosphere and back again.
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