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. | | |
INCREASING CHANCE OF FLARES: For the second day in a row, sunspot AR2415 is crackling with minor C-class solar flares. This could foreshadow stronger eruptions. The sunspot has an unstable 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for M-flares. Any such eruption on Sept. 16th would be geoeffective because the sunspot is facing Earth. Solar flare alerts: text or voice
SUNDIVING COMET DESTROYED: The solar system now has one less comet. Earlier today, a sundiving comet discovered on Sept. 15th by Worachate Boonplod, a science writer from Thailand, passed too close to the sun and apparently evaporated. A coronagraph onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded the death plunge:
One comet went in, no comets came out. Fierce heat from the sun likely evaporated the comet's fragile ices, transforming it into a disintegrated cloud of gas and dust.
Sundiving comets are more common than you might think. SOHO has found more than 3000 of them. Most are members of the Kreutz family. Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a single giant comet many centuries ago. They get their name from 19th century German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who studied them in detail. Kreutz fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate almost every day. Most, measuring less than a few meters across, are too small to see, but occasionally a bigger fragment like this one attracts attention.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
DRONE-BOW: To see a rainbow, all you need are sunlight and falling rain. Correction: that's all you need to see half a rainbow. Typical rainbows are at least 50% hidden below the horizon.To see a complete rainbow, you also need a drone. WItness this picture taken by a drone over the Netherlands on Sept. 16th:
The drone's master is photographer Martijn Harleman. He explains what happened: "Just after a short rainshower, the sun peeked through. With still some drops still falling I quickly launched my drone. As the drone ascended, the full circle showed up. I stitched together 17 pictures to capture (almost) the whole phenomenon."
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
SOLAR WIND SPARKS AURORAS: Sometimes, the trick to seeing Northern Lights isn't a great space weather forecast. It's knowing where to find a break in the clouds. "Last night (Sept. 15th), the whole state of Alaska was clouded over," reports Marketa S Murray, "but we know about a few spots between the mountains where sometimes it is clear even when the rest of Alaska is overcast." She raced to one of those spots, and this is what she saw:
The display was caused by a stream of solar wind, which is buffeting Earth's magnetic field this week. It is just the latest episode in a month-long run of great auroras around the Arctic Circle.
One reason for the recent spate of auroras is the coming change of seasons. For reasons that are not fully understood, auroras love equinoxes. At this time of year even gentle gusts of solar wind can spark a nice display of Northern or Southern Lights.
NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of more geomagnetic storms and auroras on Sept. 16th as the solar wind continues to blow. Aurora alerts: text or voice
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Realtime Sprite Photo Gallery
Realtime NLC 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 Sep. 16, 2015, the network reported 2 fireballs.
(2 52.8-3.5497.787.6, 0 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 September 16, 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 |