Marianne's Heaven On Earth Aurora Chaser Tours Chasethelighttours.co.uk invites you to join them in their quest to find and photograph the Aurora Borealis. Experience the winter wonderland in the Tromsø Area. | | | WOLF MOON: Can you hear them howl? According to folklore, tonight's full Moon is the "Wolf Moon," named long ago by Native Americans after the singing packs of wolves they heard during the winter month of January. Look east at sunset and enjoy the Wolf moonlight. [photo gallery] AURORAS AT 60 MPH: Working as a wilderness guide in Inari, FInland, Ville Heimonen has photographed auroras from the motionless solitude of countless natural settings. Last night, he decided to try something different--shooting from the window of a rollicking, fast-moving car: "One hour before this photo was taken, we saw the brightest aurora of this winter," says Heimonen. "It was incredibly bright, red and fast moving. I took this shot while I was driving home from work. It was little tricky with the bumpy road, but the moonlight helped keep the shutter speed relatively fast." The display was caused by a stream of solar wind, which has been buffeting Earth's magnetic field for several days. The auroras should subside this weekend as Earth exits the stream. NOAA forecasters have downgraded the odds of a polar geomagnetic storm on Jan. 23rd to 20%. Aurora alerts: text or voice. Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery STORM HALOS: A massive winter storm is barreling up the east coast of the United States. Heralding the storm's advance, icy clouds are wafting over some states, producing spectacular halos around the sun. Chris Cook photographed this specimen from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on Jan. 22nd: These luminous structures around the sun are caused by sunlight shining through ice crystals in "the high cloud shield of this weekend's east coast winter storm," says Cook. "It was a nice display including a 46° halo, 22° halo, a pair of sundogs, a parhelic circle, an upper tangent arc and a Parry arc. A circumzenithal arc was also visible but off the top of the frame in this horizontal panorama." Observers along the storm track should be alert for such halos before the opaque snow clouds arrive. Ice halos can appear not only around the sun, but also around the full Moon. According to folklore, this weekend's full Moon is the "Wolf Moon." However, "Storm Moon" might be more apropos. Monitor the photo gallery for sightings. Realtime Spaceweather Photo Gallery SOLAR ECLIPSE BALLOON NETWORK: Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have developed a balloon payload that can photograph solar eclipses from the stratosphere. This sets the stage for a one-of-a-kind photography experiment: On August 21, 2017, the Moon will pass in front of the sun over the USA, producing a total eclipse visible from coast to coast. We will launch balloons to record the event from a dozen points along the path of totality: Floating more than 100,000 feet above the clouds, the balloons will have an unobstructed view of the eclipse. From each of a dozen payloads, one camera will point up to record the sun's ghostly corona while another camera points down to record the passage of the Moon's dark shadow across the landscape below. When the eclipse is finished, we will combine the footage to create a unique video portrait of an eclipse sweeping across the American continent. The payload has already photographed a partial solar eclipse in Oct. 2014: images. To test the payload under conditions of totality, a team of students and parents from Earth to Sky Calculus will travel to Indonesia six weeks from now to observe the March 9, 2016, total eclipse: animated map. Stay tuned for news from their expedition! Readers, would you like to join the Solar Eclipse Balloon Network? Starting now we are recruiting teams of citizen scientists who we will train in the art of high-altitude ballooning to become members of the solar eclipse launch crews. Schools, scout troops, home school families and others are welcome to apply. This is a great way for novices to learn ballooning and to participate in authentic science. We will also be seeking sponsors for the 12 payloads. Contact Dr. Tony Phillips to register your interest. Realtime Meteor 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 Jan. 23, 2016, the network reported 5 fireballs. (5 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 January 23, 2016 there were 1663 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. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere | Situation Report -- Oct. 30, 2015 | Stratospheric Radiation (+37o N) | Cosmic ray levels are elevated (+6.1% above the Space Age median). The trend is flat. Cosmic ray levels have increased +0% in the past month. | Sept. 06: 4.14 uSv/hr (414 uRad/hr) | Sept. 12: 4.09 uSv/hr (409 uRad/hr) | Sept. 23: 4.12 uSv/hr (412 uRad/hr) | Sept. 25: 4.16 uSv/hr (416 uRad/hr) | Sept. 27: 4.13 uSv/hr (413 uRad/hr) | Oct. 11: 4.02 uSv/hr (402 uRad/hr) | Oct. 22: 4.11 uSv/hr (411 uRad/hr) | These measurements are based on regular space weather balloon flights: learn more. Approximately 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 radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Our measurements show that someone flying back and forth across the continental USA, just once, can absorb as much ionizing radiation as 2 to 5 dental X-rays. Here is the data from our latest flight, Oct. 22nd: Radiation levels peak at the entrance to the stratosphere in a broad region called the "Pfotzer Maximum." This peak is named after physicist George Pfotzer who discovered it using balloons and Geiger tubes in the 1930s. Radiation levels there are more than 80x sea level. Note that the bottom of the Pfotzer Maximim is near 55,000 ft. This means that some high-flying aircraft are not far from the zone of maximum radiation. Indeed, according to the Oct 22th measurements, a plane flying at 45,000 feet is exposed to 2.79 uSv/hr. At that rate, a passenger would absorb about one dental X-ray's worth of radiation in about 5 hours. 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. | 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 | | Web-based high school science course with free enrollment | |