11/8/09

Did You miss it?

From Space Weather:
FARSIDE EXPLOSION: On Nov. 5th, something exploded on the far side of the sun. The blast hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) over the sun's limb, recorded by coronagraphs on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Click on the image to launch a 14-hour time lapse movie:

The source of the eruption is probably sunspot 1029, which is transiting the far side of the sun. Last week, when sunspot 1029 was visible from Earth, it quickly grew into the biggest and most active sunspot of the year, unleashing ten C-class solar flares in just a few days. Apparently, the action hasn't stopped. The sun's rotation will turn the sunspot back toward Earth about a week from now. If the sunspot holds together that long, we could experience some solar activity. Stay tuned.
ASTEROID NEAR MISS: On Nov. 6th at 2132 UT, asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet's surface.Clarke Belt" of geosynchronous satellites. That's well inside the " If it had hit, the ~6-meter wide space rock would have disintegrated in the atmosphere as a spectacular fireball, causing no significant damage to the ground. 2009 VA was discovered just 15 hours before closest approach by astronomers working at the Catalina Sky Survey.
MAGNETIC FILAMENT: Today, amateur astronomers are monitoring a picturesque magnetic filament looping around the western limb of the sun. Jan Timmermans sends this picture from his backyard observatory in Valkenswaard, The Netherlands:

The portion of the filament seen in front of the sun looks dark, because it is cooler than the inferno below. But note how the filament glows in projection against the black space beyond the limb. The glow comes from plasma trapped inside the filament--not as bright as the surface of the sun, but definitely brighter than the void.
"The image clearly shows that the only difference between a 'dark' filament and a 'bright' prominence is where they are located: inside or outside the solar disk," notes Timmermans. (diagram)
****From Space weather.com. Provided here as a service to keep you easily informed.

4 comments:

Mayberry said...

Yup, I missed it. That looked like a fairly large event, fortunately aimed away from our little rock. Perhaps the sun is waking up from it's little "nap". Which was the calm before the storm...

HermitJim said...

Some pretty impressive pictures, indeed!

Thanks for sharing this information!

Dragon said...

everything else aside the "Big Show" is in the sky for the next several years.
We will see more of this.

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