PERSEID
METEOR UPDATE: “The Perseids are booming
here in Alabama,” reports astronomer Bill Cooke of the
Marshall Space Flight Center. “Although the
peak of the shower is almost a week away, we saw five
Perseid fireballs last night (Aug. 5-6). It’s a good sign
that this year’s shower will be a good one.” [live
meteor radar] [2009
Perseid gallery] [2010
meteor counts]
SOLAR
BLAST JUST MISSES EARTH: On August 7th (1825
UT), magnetic fields around sunspot 1093 became unstable and
erupted, producing a strong M1-class solar flare. Several
amateur astronomers caught
the
active region in
mid-flare, while NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded
an extreme ultraviolet movie of the entire event:
Note:
A close-up movie
is also available.
The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space,
just missing a direct sun-Earth line. Forecasters expect the
cloud to deliver no more than a glancing blow to our planet’s
magnetic field when it billows by on August 9th or 10th–not
be a major space weather event.
Future eruptions could turn out differently. Active region
1093 is rotating toward Earth. By the end of this weekend,
we’ll be in the line of fire if its magnetic fields become
unstable again. Space
Weather Phone subscribers will be the first to know.
EXTRA! SOLAR RADIO BURSTS:
The flare produced intense radio bursts detectable by ordinary
shortwave receivers on Earth. In New Mexico, amateur radio
astronomer Thomas Ashcraft picked up strong emissions around
21 MHz. “Listen
to some of the sounds than came out of the loudspeakers,”
he says. “This was a complex flare and very exciting.
Yet it is still small stuff compared to what is coming in
the future as Solar Cycle 24 intensifies.”
SUNSET
PLANETS: When the sun goes down tonight,
step outside and look west. You might see something like this:
Babak Tafreshi sends the picture from the Alborz
Mountains of Iran. “Venus, Saturn and Mars are in triple
conjunction,” says Tafreshi, “and they will be at
their most beautiful in the nights ahead.”
Next week, on August 12th, the trio will become
a quartet when the crescent Moon joins the planets for an
amazing four-way conjunction. Even more amazing, it happens
on the peak-night of the Perseid
meteor shower. Astronomy doesn’t get much better than
this!
