| AURORA ALERT:
Did you sleep through the northern lights? Next time get a
wake-up call: Spaceweather
PHONE.
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FIRST METEORS OF 2009:
The annual Quadrantid
meteor shower peaks on Jan. 3rd when Earth enters a stream of
debris from shattered comet 2003 EH1. The timing of the encounter
favors observers in western North America who could see dozens to
hundreds of meteors during the dark hours before dawn on Saturday
morning: sky
map.
The Quadrantids are a northern hemisphere shower--the farther north,
the better. During last year's display, a team of astronomers flew
a research airplane above the Arctic Circle to catch the show:
Jeremie Vaubaillon of Caltech created the composite
image, which shows more than a dozen Quadrantids flying through
the aurora borealis on Jan. 4, 2008. This year's shower could be
just as intense.
Cold winter weather often discourages people from
going outside to observe this fine shower. Are you one of them?
Tune into Spaceweather Radio
for live audio from the Air Force Space Surveillance Radar. Listening
to meteor radar echoes is a fun way to experience the Quadrantids--no
parka required.
MYSTERY PILLARS:
"The air was very cold and filled with small ice crystals on
Dec. 28th when we saw these strange pillars of light," reports
Aigar Truhin of Sigulda, Latvia. "My son exclaimed, The
aliens are coming!" It certainly looked that way."
Truhin snapped this picture using his Nikon
D90:
Photo details: Nikon
D90, 5 sec. exposure @ ISO 200-640 [more]
Many people have seen light pillars. They appear during winter
when city lights shine upward into the icy air. Reflections from
plate-shaped crystals spread the light into a vertical column: examples.
Truhin's pillars, however, are not the ordinary kind. Even two
leading experts in atmospheric optics can't quite figure them out:
"These pillars are mysterious," say Les Cowley and Marko
Riikonen. "They have unexplained curved tops and even curved
arcs coming from their base. Arcs in rare displays like these could
be from column crystals to give parts of tangent
arcs, others could be the enigmatic Moilanan
arc or even the recently
discovered reflected Parry arc. We do not know – so take more
photos on cold nights!"
UPDATED:
Dec. 2008 Aurora Gallery
[Previous Decembers: 2007,
2006, 2005,
2001, 2000]
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