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SHUTTLE FERRY ALERT:
Today, space shuttle Discovery is flying
across the United States on
the back of a 747 airliner. The pair took off from California's
Edwards Air Force Base at the crack of dawn on Sunday and they are
expected to reach the Kennedy Space Center in Florida sometime on
Monday. Intermediate stops include Amarillo, Texas, for refueling,
and Shreveport, Louisiana, for overnight rest. Sky watchers along
the
flight path should be alert for the shuttle ferry.
TRACK
THE SHUTTLE HERE
images: from
Joel Warren of Amarillo, Texas;
SATURDAY NIGHT LIGHT
SHOW: The phones started ringing around
7:30 pm EDT on Saturday night, Sept. 19th. All along the US Atlantic
seaboard, police stations and news desks received reports of strange
lights in the sky. John A. Blackwell of Exeter, New Hampshire, snapped
this picture of the phenomenon:
"It was an impressive display," says Blackwell.
"To the naked eye, it was visible for about a minute."
It looks like a passing comet or a giant, luminous
amoeba. But this was pure rocket science. The cloud was created
by a Black Brant XII sounding rocket launched from NASA's Wallops
Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket released a cloud of electrically-charged
aerosols near the top of Earth's atmosphere to investigate the formation
of noctilucent clouds or "NLCs." Mysterious
NLCs form naturally around Earth's poles during the months of
northern summer. On this September evening, researchers decided
to see if they could create an artificial NLC at mid-latitudes;
it seems to have worked.
Ground-based cameras and radars along the Atlantic
coast monitored the experiment while the STPSat-1 satellite watched
from Earth orbit. Principal investigators at the Naval Research
Lab hope the data will reveal much about the microphysics of noctilucent
clouds and the possible role
of rockets in creating them.
more images: from
Neil Winston of Lusby, Maryland; from
Geoff Chester of Alexandria, Virginia; from
Greg Piepol near Manassas, Virginia; from
Tom McIntyre of Central Park, New York;
APPROACHING SUNSPOT:
NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft stationed over
the sun's eastern limb is monitoring an active region not yet visible
from Earth. STEREO's extreme ultraviolet telescope captured this
image on Sept. 19th:
The tangle of hot, magnetized plasma circled above almost certainly
overlies a large new-cycle sunspot. We'll soon find out. The sun's
rotation is turning the active region toward Earth and it could
pop over the sun's eastern limb as early as Sept. 21st. Readers
with solar
telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
Sept.
2009 Aurora Gallery
[previous Septembers: 2008,
2007,
2006, 2005,
2004, 2002,
2001]
Explore
the Sunspot Cycle |
