Come to Tromsø and share Marianne's passion for rural photography: Chasethelighttours.co.uk invites you to experience "Heaven on Earth" with an aurora, fjord, fishing, whale watching, photography or sightseeing tour. | | | QUIET WITH A CHANCE OF FLARES: Solar activity is low, but sunspot AR2320 could break the quiet. The growing sunspot has developed a 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class solar flares. Any eruptions today would likely be geoeffective as the sunspot is directly facing Earth. Solar flare alerts: text, voice THE OZONE FRINGE: Lunar eclipses are supposed to be red. When the Moon slips into the shadow of our planet, the lunar landscape transforms from gray to amber because of sunlight scattered from the top of Earth's atmosphere. Most people who watched last Saturday's eclipse did indeed observe a rosy hue. Yet a few observers noticed something extra--a band of blue: "A blue band was visible through the eyepiece of my telescope and looked even better in the image," reports Eliot Herman of Tucson, Arizona. "I took this picture just before maximum eclipse using a Questar Q3.5 and a Nikon D810 digital camera." The blue color is caused by ozone. Atmospheric scientist Richard Keen of the University of Colorado explains: "Most of the light illuminating the Moon passes through the stratosphere, and is reddened by scattering. However, light passing through the upper stratosphere penetrates the ozone layer, which absorbs red light and actually makes the passing light ray bluer." This can be seen using binoculars or a small telescope as a turquoise-blue border around the red. More examples of the "ozone fringe" may be found in the eclipse gallery. Take a look! Realtime Eclipse Photo Gallery SUN AND MOON HALO: Ice crystals in high clouds have a beautiful effect on sunlight. Sunbeams that strike the crystals are bent into luminous rings called ice halos. Moonbeams are affected the same way. Exactly the same way. Göran Strand proved it with this composite image of the sun and Moon over Östersund, Sweden, on April 1st: "During the day I took a photo of the 22° solar halo," says Strand. "And later that night, 10 hours later, when the Moon was in the same position in the sky, I took another shot from the same location, showing a 22° Moon halo. Merging the two photos shows the halos are a perfect match." 22º radius halos are visible all over the world and throughout the year. The ice crystals that create them float 5 km to 10 km above the ground. Those altitudes are always freezing even during the warmest months of summer. Look for halos, night and day, whenever the sky is wisped with cold cirrus clouds. Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery Realtime Comet Photo Gallery 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 Apr. 7, 2015, the network reported 10 fireballs. (10 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 April 7, 2015 there were potentially hazardous asteroids. Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | The official U.S. government space weather bureau | | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. | | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. | | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory | | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | the underlying science of space weather | |