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. | | |
GEOMAGNETIC STORMS ON JULY 13TH: A stream of high-speed solar wind is buffeting Earth's magnetic field, and this is causing G1-class geomagnetic storms on July 13th. Sky watchers in several northern-tier US states saw auroras before sunrise on Monday. Philip Granrud sends this picture from the Salish Mountains of Montana:
"The Northern Lights came out outta the blue as they often do," says Granrud. "This was one of the most colorful and visible-to-the-eye displays I have seen in the last year in Montana. A large chunk of NW Montana can be seen below. Urban lights in the foreground come from the cities of Kalispell, Whitefish, Evergreen, and Columbia Falls."
High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras tonight. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of polar geomagnetic storms as the solar wind continues to blow. Aurora alerts: text or voice.
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
THE FARSIDE OF PLUTO: Pluto has two sides: the nearside that New Horizons will see when it buzzes the dwarf planet on July 14th, and the farside that it won't. New Horizons just took the best picture it will ever take of Pluto's farside from a distance of 2.5 million miles:
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, describes this image as "the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto's farside for decades to come."
Of particular interest on the farside are four dark spots connected to a dark belt that circles Pluto's equatorial region. What continues to pique the interest of scientists is their similar size and even spacing. "It's weird that they're spaced so regularly," says New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur at NASA Headquarters. Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center is equally intrigued: "We can't tell whether they're plateaus or plains, or whether they're brightness variations on a completely smooth surface." The spots appear on the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon.
No one knows what these spots are, but there is hope for a solution to the mystery: "When we combine images like this of the farside with composition and color data the spacecraft has already acquired but not yet sent to Earth, we expect to be able to read the history of this face of Pluto," says Moore.
When New Horizons makes its closest approach to Pluto in just two days, it will focus on the nearside of the dwarf planet. On the morning of July 14, New Horizons will pass about 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) from the face with a large heart-shaped feature that's captured the imagination of people around the world.
Realtime Pluto Photo Gallery
SPACE WEATHER FORECAST FOR PLUTO: Forcasting space weather in the immediate vicinity of Earth is challenging. Forecasting space weather 3 billion miles away at the edge of the known solar system is almost impossible. Nevertheless, researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center may have done it. Using a supercomputer model named "Enlil", they have tracked the motions of solar storms since January 2015 to predict conditions around Pluto in mid-July. Watch the movie, then read more about their predictions below:
"We set the simulation to start in January of 2015, because the particles passing Pluto in July 2015 took some six months to make the journey from the sun," says Dusan Odstricil of Goddard, who created the Enlil computer code in the 1990s. "During that time there were 120 separate CMEs."
"Our simulation estimates that during the New Horizon approach, Pluto might be immersed in a region with very low solar wind densities, lasting for about one month," says Odstricil. "This will be followed by a large merged region, which could significantly compress Pluto's atmosphere."
This is one of the first space weather forecasts ever attempted so far from Earth. Needless to say, it is unlikely to be a perfect reflection of reality. Odstricil says his model could be off by two to three weeks. However, comparing the models with actual measurements from New Horizons will help make far-out space weather forecasts more accurate in the future.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Realtime NLC Photo Gallery
Realtime Sprite 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 Jul. 13, 2015, the network reported 88 fireballs.
(85 sporadics, 1 , 1 Northern June Aquilid, 1 alpha Capricornid)
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 July 13, 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 |
| Web-based high school science course with free enrollment |