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FRIDAY THE 13TH GEOMAGNETIC STORM: Arriving earlier than expected, a CIR (co-rotating interaction region) hit Earth's magnetic field on June 13th, sparking a G2-class geomanetic storm. The storm is still underway now, and there is a chance it could intensify to category G3 (Strong). High latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras. Aurora alerts: SMS Text
Jessica Fridrich witnessed the glow of the CIR's impact from Binghamton, New York:
"I was shooting this surprise G2 storm under truly horrendous conditions: thick smoke from wildfires, haze, and high cirrus clouds. Despite the adversity, the solar wind did its jjob well and fired up auroras over upstate New York around 11 pm local time," says Fridrich.
CIRs are transition zones between fast- and slow-moving streams of solar wind. They're a bit like like mini-CMEs. They contain shock waves and enhanced magnetic fields that do a good job sparking geomagnetic storms. This particular CIR is powered by a large southern hole in the sun's atmosphere, which is contributing fast solar wind to the fast-slow transition zone.
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
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THIS IS *REAL* MONEY FROM SPACE: On July 16, 1969, the world watched as a Saturn V rocket launched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon. Exactly 55 years later, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched the US Mint's limited edition Saturn V dollar coin to the stratosphere:
This is real money. You can have a single coin for $49.95 or an entire unbroken roll for $299.95. No longer available from the US Mint, these rare coins flew 121,665 feet above the Sierra Nevada on July 16, 2024. One side shows the mighty Saturn V rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral; the other side features the Statue of Liberty in profile.
The students are selling space coins to support to support their cosmic ray research program. (Helium is expensive!) Each order comes with a greeting card showing the coins in flight and telling the story of their journey to the stratosphere and back again.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education
A HIDDEN WORLD OF SOLAR ACTIVITY: In the 17th century when Anton van Leeuwenhoek looked through a microscope and saw bacteria for the first time, he revealed a new "world of the small" and forever upended the field of biology. Is the same thing about to happen to solar physics?
Maybe. A paper just published in Nature Astronomy reports a new technology for seeing very small things in the atmosphere of the sun. It's a system of adaptive optics that corrects for turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. A test run in July 2023 on the 1.6 m Goode Solar Telescope in California's Big Bear Lake produced an immediate discovery:
"We became astounded witnesses to a strange, short-lived object," recalls the research team, led by Dirk Schmidt of the NSF National Solar Observatory. "We call it a twisted plasmoid."
The plasmoid is unlike anything seen inside the sun's atmosphere before. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory was observing at the same time and saw nothing. The Big Bear adaptive optics system is so good at correcting turbulent blur, it outperforms space telescopes.
A movie of the plasmoid shows a narrow stream of plasma less than 100 km wide moving like a flagellate under van Leeuwenhoek's microscope. The front of the stream "suddenly stopped and collided with its own rear half," before fading away. Other structures observed by the team may be as narrow as 20 km across.
The 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope in Big Bear Lake. The steady temperature of the water surface helps keep the air around the telescope calm
It's not clear whether this is a significant discovery or just something idiosyncratic and weird. We'll soon find out. The researchers plan to install the same system on the giant Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, where adaptive optics on its 4-meter mirror could reveal an even greater menagerie. Let the plasmoid hunt begin!
For more images from the new adaptive optics system, click here.
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Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
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Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Jun 13, 2025, the network reported 1 fireballs.
(1 sporadics)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On June 13, 2025 there were 2349 potentially hazardous asteroids.
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Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: | Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
| 2014 LL26 | 2025-Jun-08 | 8 LD | 5.2 | 31 |
| 2025 LK | 2025-Jun-08 | 0.3 LD | 10.3 | 15 |
| 2025 KP8 | 2025-Jun-08 | 13.6 LD | 13.7 | 53 |
| 2015 XR1 | 2025-Jun-12 | 18.1 LD | 12.6 | 81 |
| 2022 KQ5 | 2025-Jun-12 | 13.6 LD | 5.1 | 5 |
| 2025 KV4 | 2025-Jun-12 | 4.1 LD | 8 | 26 |
| 2025 KF1 | 2025-Jun-12 | 8.1 LD | 9.7 | 38 |
| 2023 XO15 | 2025-Jun-15 | 17.8 LD | 3.4 | 24 |
| 2025 HN6 | 2025-Jun-16 | 6.4 LD | 2.3 | 23 |
| 2000 LF3 | 2025-Jun-17 | 18.9 LD | 14.5 | 169 |
| 2023 XU2 | 2025-Jun-18 | 11.1 LD | 15.6 | 32 |
| 2025 KT6 | 2025-Jun-19 | 7 LD | 9.2 | 72 |
| 2003 AY2 | 2025-Jun-22 | 14.2 LD | 15.9 | 386 |
| 2014 DH | 2025-Jun-28 | 17.1 LD | 12.1 | 17 |
| 2019 JM | 2025-Jul-09 | 16.6 LD | 6.9 | 14 |
| 2019 NW5 | 2025-Jul-09 | 15.2 LD | 16.5 | 65 |
| 2005 VO5 | 2025-Jul-11 | 15.9 LD | 14.4 | 382 |
| 2022 YS5 | 2025-Jul-17 | 17.4 LD | 6.1 | 38 |
| 2018 BY6 | 2025-Jul-19 | 13.7 LD | 7.4 | 69 |
| 2019 CO1 | 2025-Aug-08 | 17.8 LD | 10.5 | 65 |
| 2022 QB1 | 2025-Aug-10 | 8.9 LD | 3.9 | 6 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. | | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Almost once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with sensors that detect secondary cosmic rays, a form of radiation from space that can penetrate all the way down to Earth's surface. Our monitoring program has been underway without interruption for 10 years, resulting in a unique dataset of in situ atmospheric measurements.
Latest results (Nov. 2024): Atmospheric radiation is sharply decreasing in 2024. Our latest measurements in November registered a 10-year low:
What's going on? Ironically, the radiation drop is caused by increasing solar activity. Solar Cycle 25 has roared to life faster than forecasters expected. The sun's strengthening and increasingly tangled magnetic field repels cosmic rays from deep space. In addition, solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays, causing sharp reductions called "Forbush Decreases." The two effects blend together to bring daily radiation levels down.
.Who cares? Cosmic rays are a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. They can alter the chemistry of the atmosphere, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. According to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan school of public health, crews of aircraft have higher rates of cancer than the general population. The researchers listed cosmic rays, irregular sleep habits, and chemical contaminants as leading risk factors. A number of controversial studies (#1, #2, #3, #4) go even further, linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.
Technical notes: The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Data points in the graph labeled "Stratospheric Radiation" correspond to the peak of the Regener-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Regener and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
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