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Epic Geomagnetic Storm Erupts
astroengine writes "On Monday, at around 2 p.m. ET, a coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into the Earth's magnetosphere. For a short time (between 3:06 p.m and 3:11 p.m. ET), energetic solar wind particles penetrated as deep as geosynchronous orbit — home to hundreds of communication satellites. As a consequence, a geomagnetic storm is underway, generating bright aurorae across very low latitudes."
Adds reader dtmos, quoting from Spaceweather, which also has a beautiful photo gallery: "'The impact strongly compressed Earth's magnetic field, directly exposing geosynchronous satellites to solar wind plasma, and sparked an intense geomagnetic storm. As night fell over North America, auroras spilled across the Canadian border into the contiguous United States.' Aurora were seen as far south as Baileyton, Alabama."
If this had been posted YESTERDAY some of us might have gotten up early to see those Aurorae
pending committee review
a coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into the Earth's magnetosphere. Tsingi makes some popcorn...
Wow. Another epic one.
So let's try to keep a lid on the Hollywood hyperbole, shall we?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
and this happens. i live in Alabama and seeing this has always been a dream of mine. Had this only been posted 6 or 7 hours ago.
So "epic" that it didn't do any noticeable damage. Wake me when we get a real CME.
The world did not come to an end, the electric grid was unfazed and no sattelite seems to have been effected.
a geomagnetic storm is underway
"was" not "is"
I was hoping to do some ham radio work on the 6 meter band using that, but I'm way too late, or so I'm told.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I live in a rural area with little light pollution and where I can clearly see the milky way - and it was quite a sight. All I'll say is that when you see it the first time, unprepared as I was, it can be disconcerting and even alarming. You know something powerfully primitive is occurring, not normal; I imagine like an animal responding to a forest fire.
I got up this morning, and my over-the-air reception of local stations was severely disrupted. I did however, pick up stations from 250 miles away in Saint Louis. Now I know that Saint Louis stations are only slightly less boring than Kansas City Stations... Thanks CME!
I guess this explains what I saw last night in SE Virginia. I happened to walk outside and look to the north and the sky was all red. It was very strange, glowing red. One of my neighbors was outside and I asked him if he saw it too, he did. Got my wife and kids out, they didn't last real long, there were streaks of dark that looked almost like straight lines running 'down' reddened sky. It was very odd, kinda creepy looking, and then a "shooting star", pretty long lasting one happened to streak down the sky running parralel with the dark streaks. I figured the "shooting star" was unrelated, but it sure was coincidental. I checked back many times last night and didn't see it any more.
Just wait until the aliens land.
Yesterday was the opening of the Mid-Atlantic Star Party near Robbins, NC.
While we were getting gear set up yesterday afternoon someone had a C-11 with a white light filter and a Solarmax 60 riding piggy back.
Both showed a TON of activity on the sun - filaments, sun spots, and some huge prominences. Little did we know we would get a solar show after dark!
About 9:30 PM EDT the transparency was good but seeing was still soft. When we wondered who threw on a big light to the north of the field - all of a sudden everything got bright up there.
Since aurora's are so uncommon this far south, it took us a minute to figure out what was going on.
It gave us a really nice show and rose up fairly high between Cassiopeia and Polaris with another large band pushing up west of Polaris.
We had sheeting red with some green pillars shooting up. There were about 75 of us just standing around the observing field, slack-jawed with the occasional ohhh and ahh =-)
A couple folks got on their cell phones and we had observers all around central NC out and reporting visual confirmation from their locations.
We had a very solid show for about 20 minutes with residual lower level observations coming and going for probably another 20 minutes.
Quite a remarkable start for a star party! =-)
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
Seriously, the telecomms are sloooowly moving on fiber-optic lines. Should have been serious starts on that years ago as a backup to satellites at the very least. One super-epic flare and kiss those satellites good bye, no matter how hardened they are, and they will take months if not years to completely replace. What do you do in the meantime? Oops?
On the plus side, though, all the spy sats in the world would also be fried. Always a silver lining....
The sun is whipping us with its fiery magnetic tentacles. Run away?
clouds.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The free NASA "3D Sun" iphone app will give notices of CMEs if you allow it:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/17feb_3dsun/
There are a few Android apps that get SDO and other space weather data, but I don't know which ones of those will generate alerts rather than you have to go and actively look at them.
(disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hence explains why my GPS system was erratic that morning.
Everything is epic that we miss. It's one of the incontrovertible laws of physics.
http://fyngyrz.com/?page_id=748
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
University of Alberta aurora watch service:
http://corona-gw.phys.ualberta.ca/AuroraWatch/
when i was 16