MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distanceīetween Earth and the Moon.
Each one comes with a greeting card showing the moonstone in flight and telling the story of its trip to the stratosphere and back again.Īll sales support hands-on STEM education Engraved with "I Love You More," it makes a romantic Valentine's gift. The students are selling these sterling silver infinity-wrapped moonstone pendants to support their ballooning program. This one hitched a ride on an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray research balloon, floating 112,201 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California: "I LOVE YOU MORE" MOONSTONE PENDANT: Valentine's Day is coming! Nothing says "I love you" like a moonstone from space. If it does explode, however, the blast will be Earth directed. So far the sunspot has not produced any significant flares. These dimensions make it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. "I took this picture during a minute of good seeing and-wow!-the details are astounding."ĪR2924 has two dark cores as wide as Earth bookending a scatter of asteroid-sized spots stretching across 150,000 km of the sun's surface.
David Leong photographed AR2924 this morning from Hong Kong:
Stay tuned.īIG SOUTHERN SUNSPOT: One of the biggest sunspots of young Solar Cycle 25 is crossing the sun's southern hemisphere. But astronomers will be checking to see how close to 360 degrees it gets. The sun-Venus-Earth alignment this year is not quite perfect enough for closure. With Venus's nightside facing Earth, the only illumination we can see is a narrow arc of sunlight filtering through the top of Venus's atmosphere. 8th, Venus reaches " inferior conjunction," almost perfectly between the sun and Earth. Venus was only 5☀9' from the sun at the time of the exposure." "I took the picture in broad daylight while the sun was hidden behind a nearby building. "An arc of 273 degrees is visible," says Vacca. Alberto Vacca took this picture yesterday in Parma, Italy: Now the horns of the crescent are almost touching. THE HORNS OF VENUS ARE ALMOST TOUCHING: For the past few weeks, Venus has been transforming itself into a crescent as the planet passes between Earth and the sun. The gaseous material is flowing from a southern hole in the sun's atmosphere. 9-10 when a minor stream of solar wind is expected to hit Earth. Neutron counts from the University of Oulu's Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory show that cosmic rays reaching Earth are slowly declining-a result of the yin-yang relationship between the solar cycle and cosmic rays.ĪRCTIC AURORA WATCH: Arctic auroras are likely on Jan. Credit: SDO/HMIĬosmic Rays Solar Cycle 25 is beginning, and this is reflected in the number of cosmic rays entering Earth's atmosphere. In that event, power lines, cables, and satellites that support GPS could be damaged - and experts say we have no idea how resilient the current infrastructure of the internet is to large solar activity.Sunspot AR2924 has rapidly grown into one of the largest sunspots of young Solar Cycle 25. In the worst-case scenario, a solar storm may be calamitous enough to place the entire world into an “internet apocalypse”. "It’s just that the CMEs were not that big - but that process happened here, where we had back-to-back two, three different CMEs came sweeping in together”, adding that there are “a lot of unknowns in the space weather business." "We have determined for all practical purposes that our worst-case scenario for the extreme geomagnetic storm event scenario will indeed be this." Murtagh said. However, with this specific kind of ‘cannibalising’ CME, the results can be far more severe. but at this level of storming it’s very manageable." "They’re seeing it, they’re feeling it, we’re seeing some of those voltage irregularities. "This kind of level of storming we’ve had hundreds of examples, so we have a good sense for what it will do to the grid," Murtagh said. CMEs threaten power grids and satellites but are usually manageable.