Listen to radar echoes from satellites and meteors, live on listener-supported Space Weather Radio. | | |
QUIET SUN: WIth no sunspots actively flaring, the sun's x-ray output has flatlined. Solar activity is low. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.
FIRST METEOR SHOWER OF 2013: This morning, Earth pased through a stream of debris from shattered comet 2003 EH1, source of the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. Althogh bright gibbous moonlight washed out much of the display, sky watchers did witness a number of Quadrantid fireballs. Astronomy professor Jimmy Westlake caught this one flying over Colorado:
"This slow, bright Quadrantid fireball sliced through the frigid night air at 3:56 AM MST on the morning of January 3, 2013 over Stagecoach, Colorado," says Westlake. "The temperature was -12ºF, the sky deep blue, due to the waning gibbous Moon at my back. I used a Nikon D700 digital SLR set at ISO 3200 and a Nikkor 35 mm lens at f4.0 for this 20-second tripod-mounted exposure. In the full-sized image, Jupiter gleams among the stars of Taurus to the right of the meteor as the stars of Orion sparkle to the left."
In Ohio, amateur astronomer John Chumack recorded even more Quadrantids. "Last night the Quadrantid meteoroids started slamming into the Earth's atmosphere!" he says. "My network of meteor cameras was recording the North, East, Zenith, and Western portions of the sky. In total, I captured 52 Quadrantid meteors. This video clip shows the action on the night of Jan. 2-3."
"It's not over yet," he adds. "Keep watching as sometime you can see a few meteors for several days after the shower peak too!" Another recommendation: Listen for Quadrantid echoes from Spaceweather's live meteor radar.
Realtime Meteor Photo Gallery
QUIET, NOT DEAD: Solar activity is low, but not utterly absent. On Dec. 31st, magnetic fields winding around the sun's northeastern limb un-twisted explosively. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action:
The movie spans four hours with a rapid-fire cadence of only 30 seconds. It hows a mass of hot plasma flying upward. Unable to break the bonds of the sun's gravity, however, most of the material fell back to the stellar surface.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Realtime Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery
[previous years: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011]