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I thought the same thing, but according to SpaceWeather.com, there has not been a X-class flare in the last 24 hours - just a minor C6 flare. Sunspot 431 poses a 10% threat of an X-class flare in the next 24 hours.

Yes, and if you go to spaceweather.com you can get sign up for emails about solar events and increased auroral activity.

Nbc 5 has some nice pictures of the meteor. The slideshow is really cool. Spaceweather.com also has some more information concerning it.

I was one of the people that felt and heard the sonic boom it created, my sister witnessed it in the sky.

Any many say you can hear them too! See, for example Leonid Meteor Sounds. Could be the power of suggestion, but one theory says that EMF from the ionization induces sounds in metallic nearby objects.

Check out Slash for Astronomy at
M57: The Ring

For all of the armature astronomers out there with a passing interest in this stuff, here are some helpful links for this years storm:

Where to find a dark place to view from: DarkSky.org

The storm forecast by city (US/World) from NASA: NASA

Astronomy Links In General:

NASA's J-Pass Satellite Passes: Near earth objects(Java,Email)

NASA's SkyWatch 1.4: Excellent for finding events (Java)

Satellite Related Software: For UNIX, Mac, Windows, Palm & more

SpaceWeather.com: Plan to see the auroras

SlashDot.org: Leonid's Last Year

Weather.com: Don't forget to check before you leave

By MichaelCrawford: This /.r makes telescopes

Tips: viewing and what I bring with me.

We also get hit by CMEs that are caused by "backside events," which are flares or other disturbances that erupt behind the limb of the Sun and we didn't see them occur. STEREO is supposed to help there.

One researcher in the field of solar weather forecasting put the maturity level of space weather forecasting 50 years behind that of terrestrial weather forecasting. That was the state in 2000 and not much has improved since. The biggest difference is that for Earth weather forecasting we have continuous global weather observations on both the ground and from space. There is only a tiny fraction of coverage for space weather, and as I mentioned in my first post it still isn't clear what kinds of instruments are sufficient.

Good information resources on space weather can be found at the Space Environment Center at NOAA's web site. They have a nice education page on space weather. For a look into what the space weather field priorities are, one place to start is the Living With A Star program page.

Some people are way ahead of you. ;)

Ironically, I think their forcasts are more accurate than our local guys.
=Smidge=

The best time to look for an aurora on any given night, unfortunately, is toward the middle of the night and into the morning (If you're an early riser that's okay!). It's always best to look for a weak green glow low in the northern sky. But when big disturbances occur, the aurora can be seen much earlier in the evening and much higher in the sky. If a bright display occurs early in the evening, there is a good chance that another display will follow a couple of hours later. Its colors can vary from green to red, and you can see much shimmering.

This is the information from SEC (NOAA): Only a few C class events are listed:
0221 UTC C2.8
0955 UTC C8.8
0930 UTC C6.7

You can easily see all the recent events from this plot of solar X-ray flux: (updated in real-time)

There was a minor X class flare last friday (as you can see from the plot!). This is what the poster may be refereing to:
8/30/02 1329 UTC X1.5 Sunspot 95
It was a limb event and isn't headed our way. The plot shows there were no X-ray flares today!

X class flares are fairly common (once every 2-3 weeks these days...) Usually they are near the limb or backside events and don't effect us other than a little radio interference. We might see an earth directed one from region 95 in the next few days. (But don't count on it!) If there is an X-ray event indicated by www.spaceweather.com, then check this alert page at Solar Terestrial Dispatch. These impact predictions are often very accurate! (Only updated if there is a strong earth directed event!)

This is the information from SEC (NOAA): Only a few C class events are listed:
0221 UTC C2.8
0955 UTC C8.8
0930 UTC C6.7

You can easily see all the recent events from this plot of solar X-ray flux: (updated in real-time)

There was a minor X class flare last friday (as you can see from the plot!). This is what the poster may be refereing to:
8/30/02 1329 UTC X1.5 Sunspot 95
It was a limb event and isn't headed our way. The plot shows there were no X-ray flares today!

X class flares are fairly common (once every 2-3 weeks these days...) Usually they are near the limb or backside events and don't effect us other than a little radio interference. We might see an earth directed one from region 95 in the next few days. (But don't count on it!) If there is an X-ray event indicated by www.spaceweather.com, then check this alert page at Solar Terestrial Dispatch. These impact predictions are often very accurate! (Only updated if there is a strong earth directed event!)

The folks at Yale were not the only ones looking at the sky that night. SpaceWeather.com has some links to other images here.

/Don

Asteroids zip by the earth fairly often. You can see the closest ones in the Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) section of the spaceweather.com page.

What is unusual about this one is that it will be 8th magnitude, which will be easily visible in binoculars or a telescope even in a slightly or moderately light-polluted area. Most of the asteroids that zip by are 12th-14th magnitude and therefore only visible in moderate to large aperture telescopes with dark skies.

For live sounds, check out NASA's Online VLF Receiver

These sounds were incorporated into a song by totally badass producer Si Begg:

S.I. Futures - Ionic Funk

right here - current conditions:
Solar Wind speed: 512.9 km/s
density:3.5 protons/cm3

plus more.

The moon is a 1/2-degree diameter disk sweeping the sky in pretty much the same plane as the planets. So it occults planets and stars quite frequently.

Here are pictures from the Nov/Dec 2001 series on encounter, a few months ago!

You might be getting it from a movie, but it's actually correct. Unfortunately, Mars' atmosphere would be considered a usable vacuum here for many purposes. Even more unfortunately, it's probably not correctable over the long term. Mars lacks a significant magnetic field. This results in erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind. Unless a way is found to create a large enough magnetic field to protect an artificial atmosphere, it will bleed off into space as the original one did. This also leaves inhabitants much more vulnerable to radiation from solar flares and similar events.

Now this isn't as cool as hearing meteors unaided with my ears. But while I was outside watching the Leonids here in Cupertino, I was also watching and listening to NASA's Meteor-radar with a linux program called baudline. There was a lot of activity that night, about a hit a second. Unfortunately I can't correlate the radar hits with the visuals since I live in California and the meteor radar is in other states (NM TX and AL). Still it was cool.

Right now the meteor radar is getting a hit about every 20 seconds. Sweet, I just saw a 70 second streak with a doppler shift of about 183 Hz. That is screaming at about 17X earth rotation! (If I wasn't so lazy I'd calculate that in MPH or m/s)

How did I do it? I just piped the real-time NASA stream into the standard input (stdin) of baudline, then equalized it with about 10 seconds of quietness, and then watched and listened away. I used this command line:

mpg123 -s http://icecast.msfc.nasa.gov:8000/forward-scat | baudline -stdin -channels 1 -overlap 100 -fftsize 2048 -mem 9 -record -samplerate 22050 -session meteor_radar

If the geocities site for baudline craps out, try again later, or try the mirror site. The downloaded md5sum for baudline_0.87_i686.tar.gz should be 72f949826ac81a461a8b4b5c5551f366

What strikes me about these images is that the Aurora is very red in these images. The aurora was always green when I saw it. Rarely there would be a little red in it for a short time.

All-red auroras are seen near the beginnings of large magnetic storms, and only during some of these. At such times, large numbers of electrons originating on the sun stream into the high atmosphere. There they strike oxygen atoms resident at altitudes 200 to 500 km and cause them to emit quanta of pure red light. Normal green auroras and green auroras tinged with reddish lower borders occur at much lower altitude, typically near 100 km. The electrons that produce these auroras are more energetic than those creating blood-red auroras so they penetrate more deeply into the atmosphere. During their passage through the upper reaches, these electrons also cause red emissions from oxygen atoms but the red color usually is so much weaker than the green that it is detected only with special instruments.

spaceweather.com has collected some pictures taken by amateurs Monday night.

If you missed the auroras you can alway check out some beautiful pictures of them here. The auroras were so bright in some places that they could be seen from brightly lit cities, cool...

You can always check out the Aurora gallerys on this page, the photographers decsribe a bit about how they did and what equipment they used to get those beautiful pictures. Mostly people use ASA 400 with a 10 to 20 sec exposure time, but of course that depends on which lens you use. And the best way to learn is to try several exposure times and or films and remember to make notes for each photo you take (just to know what you did right and what went wrong). Often you can get pretty good pictures even if the aurora is faint, but thats a matter of exposure time and luck. But look at the photo details at the page, those guys know how to do it right :)

I havent seen any predictions about where on the scale this blob is, but it is possibly a R2 (or lower) - which means moderate effects. That is, only limited radio blackouts on the sunlit side.

Here's some facts about how to do if you want to look at this meteor shower. For those who really wants to read alot about this, here's an extensive guide to meteor showers and their observation. They are best wieved in the late evening. The peak for the meteor shower is calculated to be today (2001-10-09) but remember that the date of maximum is approximate, viewing is possible +/- 2 days of it. The radiant at maximum will be at 262 degrees, ie. RA 17h 28.2m, Dec +54, which is about 2 degrees north of the star beta Draconis, called Restaban, on the shortest side of the head of Draco. (Need a glossary or a star chart?) Anyway these are slow meteors, at about 20 km/sec, so they will be very distinctive - and much easier to catch on photographs!

If you don't wanna go out to look for the showers, you can always tune in to NASA's forward scatter meteor radar system at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. On a typical day, when there's no intense meteor shower, radar listeners will hear about one ping per minute or so. Rates could become substantially higher during a meteor shower.

Some recently updated graph of Giacobinids 2001 from observations shows unfortunately that they seem to be rather weak this year, just about 5-6 per hour :(. But thats not so surprising because the strength of the Draconid meteor shower has varied considerably over the years, reaching 'storm' level in 1933 and 1946 when thousands were seen and the sky looked like it was really falling! In Belgium in 1933, observers counted about 78 meteors per minute. Because of its variable nature - it's like playing on lottery when going out to observe this shower. Although chances of seeing any activity from this shower in a given year are minimal, one of these years you could be pleasantly surprised!

But there will be more meteor showers this month, for example the Orionids (October 21-22) which are predicted to be stronger than the Draconids (atleast compared with the observational data for the Draconids recently reported :). The Orionids are debris from Halley's Comet. Also the Leonids are coming now in November (18th) again, and this time it seems to be a big meteor shower. Actually, predictions by the world's top meteor experts expects it to be the most dramatic meteor shower in 35 years.

My apologies for not mentioning that the utility was Windoze only.

Here are the URLs for some useful aurora data.

NOAA POES satellite
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html

GOES8 Proton Flux
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/rt_plots/pro_3d.html

Space Weather Now
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SWN/

For images of recent auroras, go to Space Weather
http://www.spaceweather.com

The largest recorded since we've started measuring these things was an X20 in 1989. Quebec's power system overloaded that year.

According to this table, the 1989 flare is tied for #1 with one from April of this year (at least, in terms of X-ray intensity). However I don't remember hearing about any significant power or communication disruptions from the April flare.

Looks like around 2000UT, the CME hit our earth, pushing the veolicity up to around 800, and now it's about 750.. if it's clear out where you live, probably, above 55 degrees magnetic latitude will have a good chance of seeing some northern lights.. keep your eye on POES Auroral Activity or space.com's Aurora Cam. Plus, watch spaceweather.com for updates in the next day about the storm

Spaceweather.com reported yesterday:
This morning at 1038 UT a powerful X2.6 solar flare erupted near the large sunspot 9632. A radiation storm (currently S2-class) is in progess and intensifying.The explosion also hurled a lopsided halo coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. The Earth-directed CME, pictured right in a SOHO coronagraph animation, will sweep past our planet late Tuesday or Wednesday and probably trigger geomagnetic storms.

Interested in what the solar flares have affected in the past (from Roman legions to gas line explosions to Galaxy IV)?

A little NASA article.

We're at the height of the 11 year solar flare cycle. I wonder what will happen tomorrow..

I don't want to seem overly picky here, but it's actually an X2.6 class flare - the resulting radiation storm is an S3 class event.

http://www.spaceweather.com has more information about this flare.

It is a class S3 flare, which is strong enough to expose people travelling in commercial jets at high altitude to radiation equivalent to 1 chest x-ray. On average, the Sun only has about a dozen storms this strong or stronger every solar cycle (11 years). In other words, it's a fairly big one. (reference: http://www.sec.noaa.gov/NOAAscales/#SolarRadiation Storms

Another great resource for information on solar activity is SpaceWeather.com.

NASA always has several informative mailing lists that can at times be very interesting.

See the SpaceWeather page for more details. There's a link to live radar echos there also.

Sunspot 9393 with the surface area 13 times larger than the Earth, has ejected a coronal mass due to arrive Tuesday. A smaller ejection Thursday resulted in fantastic Aurora displays as far south as Carlsbad, NM, and Stoneville, NC. The downside is that the resulting magnetic storm could disrupt satellites, or even interfere with powergrids.

Though the ejection did occur on 4/1/01, this isn't April Fool's joke. SpaceWeather.com rates this ejection as M5, capable of causing significant radio interference, though probably unlikely to interfere with power transmission. But the spot 9393 is still facing Earth and appears to be building up to another ejection which could be much more devastating (especially if you live in California where the grid is already so stretched).

Sunspot 9393 with the surface area 13 times larger than the Earth, has ejected a coronal mass due to arrive Tuesday. A smaller ejection Thursday resulted in fantastic Aurora displays as far south as Carlsbad, NM, and Stoneville, NC. The downside is that the resulting magnetic storm could disrupt satellites, or even interfere with powergrids.

Though the ejection did occur on 4/1/01, this isn't April Fool's joke. SpaceWeather.com rates this ejection as M5, capable of causing significant radio interference, though probably unlikely to interfere with power transmission. But the spot 9393 is still facing Earth and appears to be building up to another ejection which could be much more devastating (especially if you live in California where the grid is already so stretched).

Also, you can check out real-time satellite maps showing the extent of the auroral circle (in both N and S hemispheres) at www.sec.noaa.gov (note that the site has down -- or overwhelmed -- intermittently over the past day or so). Of course, if you live someplace dark you can just go outside and see for yourself, but if you're in a light-polluted area like me you can at least tell beforehand whether it's worth taking a drive to someplace with better skies. (Which I attempted to do last night, but unfortunately clouds thwarted my valiant attempt :-( )

The pictures are here. Some great desktop wallpaper. Surprisingly, a few look exactly like the wallpaper that comes bundled with Mac OS X. :)

For those of you that just want the purdy pictures, have a look at:

http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_20mar01 .html - spaceweather's aurora borealis gallery of photos

Or alternatively just go direct to a few pictures found in the gallery:

• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ eklund5.jpg - Tiedye style northern lights! \;)
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ zimmerman1.jpg - An imposing vibrant green light in the Alaskan skies
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ curtis1.jpg - A photo taken during a quick changing aurora borealis storm.

Enjoy! These things are really a lot more impressive in person, as they dance around the night sky. Picture those early Windows 3.1 screensavers superimposed into space and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Please, stay seated, Bill Gates doesn't actually rule the universe, that was just a for-instance.)

For those of you that just want the purdy pictures, have a look at:

http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_20mar01 .html - spaceweather's aurora borealis gallery of photos

Or alternatively just go direct to a few pictures found in the gallery:

• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ eklund5.jpg - Tiedye style northern lights! \;)
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ zimmerman1.jpg - An imposing vibrant green light in the Alaskan skies
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ curtis1.jpg - A photo taken during a quick changing aurora borealis storm.

Enjoy! These things are really a lot more impressive in person, as they dance around the night sky. Picture those early Windows 3.1 screensavers superimposed into space and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Please, stay seated, Bill Gates doesn't actually rule the universe, that was just a for-instance.)

For those of you that just want the purdy pictures, have a look at:

http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_20mar01 .html - spaceweather's aurora borealis gallery of photos

Or alternatively just go direct to a few pictures found in the gallery:

• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ eklund5.jpg - Tiedye style northern lights! \;)
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ zimmerman1.jpg - An imposing vibrant green light in the Alaskan skies
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ curtis1.jpg - A photo taken during a quick changing aurora borealis storm.

Enjoy! These things are really a lot more impressive in person, as they dance around the night sky. Picture those early Windows 3.1 screensavers superimposed into space and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Please, stay seated, Bill Gates doesn't actually rule the universe, that was just a for-instance.)

For those of you that just want the purdy pictures, have a look at:

http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_20mar01 .html - spaceweather's aurora borealis gallery of photos

Or alternatively just go direct to a few pictures found in the gallery:

• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ eklund5.jpg - Tiedye style northern lights! \;)
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ zimmerman1.jpg - An imposing vibrant green light in the Alaskan skies
• http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/images/20mar01/ curtis1.jpg - A photo taken during a quick changing aurora borealis storm.

Enjoy! These things are really a lot more impressive in person, as they dance around the night sky. Picture those early Windows 3.1 screensavers superimposed into space and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Please, stay seated, Bill Gates doesn't actually rule the universe, that was just a for-instance.)

this is one of the most amazing ones i've seen.
---

Here's a bunch... :-)

Aurora pictures

just tune any quality FM reciever to a dead area(no signal and quiet) at the lowest freq. you can; and listen close. you might hear something like this.

for an explanation of whats going on and a link to NASA's radio meteor detection system at Marshall Space Flight Center go here: http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatte r.html

just tune any quality FM reciever to a dead area(no signal and quiet) at the lowest freq. you can; and listen close. you might hear something like this.

for an explanation of whats going on and a link to NASA's radio meteor detection system at Marshall Space Flight Center go here: http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatte r.html

Let's face it, it will be too dang cold to watch the Quadrantids. And most of us have seen a meteor shower before.

So instead, go LISTEN to them. NASA has set up a meteor-scatter detection system at Marshall Space Flight Center that listens in for the Ch. 4 television carrier. Every time a meteor leaves an ionized trail, a Ch. 4 carrier from beyond the horizon is reflected, and you can hear it.

You can hear something like 10 meteors for every one you can see. Amateur radio operators sometimes work meteor scatter using morse code, but you can see that you've got to send really fast to get anything out. There are also special packet radio protocols for using meteor scatter.

Finally a space article that didn't come from cnn...

Kudo's

To bad Space Elevators are the Super Dense Optical Storage Devices of Space Industry. A Red Herring.

suggested Space News Site's spaceflightnow
SpaceDaily
NasaWatch
SpaceWeather
Nasa
It's ashame that SpaceOnline bit the dust and was absorbed by space.com, along with SpaceViews

If you want some real action become a Nasa click worker at http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top
Maybe Slashdot will even do a story on it...

I wait with herring baited breath

I don't think that there is a 40% chance of electrical outages, but rather a 40% chance of a storm that could cause aurora(s?).

It seems the relative strength of these storms is nothing to write home about.

What this site needs to become is sort of like a Weather Underground for auroras.

Well, there already are other similar services. The Alaska page already mentioned is a good one. Spaceweather.com is a fairly good site as well. And there are also sites for reporting your own aurora observations. The Auroral Activity Page is for world wide aurora observations, while this page at the University of Minnesota is for the midwest of the U.S. and Canada.

--

Another site worth checking out is SpaceWeather.com which has daily pictures of the sun (and spots), coronal holes, solar flare and geomagnetic storm forecasts and other useful information.

Also check out Nasa's science site about this event. They also have an active email newsletter that keeps you up to date on interesting space stuff like this.

blessings,

For a current look at the density around earth, check out NASA's Spaceweather site. You can find graphs of the solar wind's speed, density, composition, and polairity at the ACE Solar Wind Observatory site. Look under ACE Plots.