StormTrack Blog

The northern lights were visible across southern Michigan and Northwest Ohio on Monday night.  If you saw them, it was quite the early Halloween treat! 

A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth on Oct. 24th at approximately 1800 UT (2:00 pm EDT). 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

Here is one picture from Adrian, Michigan:

Adrian, MI

You must check out additional photos that have been compliled from www.spaceweather.com:

 

The wait for the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) continues. As it is expected to make but a glancing blow on the Earth’s magnetic field, the timing of the impact is difficult (much more straightforward for a direct hit). Look for G1 (minor) Geomagnetic Storm conditions from 1200 UTC tomorrow (June 9) through June 10. The possibility remains for heightened Radiation Storm levels with the passage of the CME shock, but nothing greater than S2 (moderate) is forecast.

These types of eruptions can cause troubles with airline travels, GPS systems and have been known to knock power grids off line.

CLICK HERE for and Awesome animation of the GOES 15 Solar X-Ray Imager that is pictured below!!!

Although it will feel quite spring-like Thursday and Friday, spring will officially arrive Sunday evening at 7:21 pm.

This is the vernal equinox — when the direct rays of sun hit the equator, giving us equal day and equal night.

The perfect 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness occurs near the equator at the equinox.  We actually experience that slightly earlier.  Wednesday marks the last day with less than 12 hours of daylight.  Thursday (St Patrick’s Day) will have exactly 12 hours of daylight.

We will continue to gain 1 to 3 minutes of daylight each day until we hit the start of summer in June.

It has felt like winter for awhile now, but the astronomical start of winter occurs today.

The winter solstice marks the time when the direct rays of the sun reach its most southern point on the globe, which is the Tropic of Capricorn.  This occurs at 6:38 PM EST today.

Clouds tonight will not be helpful in viewing the total lunar eclipse tonight.

Here is a link about the event

With the start of fall, we now have just slightly over 12 hours of daylight. (Even though equinox means equal day & equal night, since the earth is not a perfect circle, not all areas have exactly 12 hours of each on the first day of fall.)

In a few days, we will drop below 12 full hours of daylight as we continue to lose about 2-3 minutes of daylight each day.

Since the start of summer, roughly three hours of daylight has been lost.  We will lose another 3 hours of daylight between now and the start of winter on December 21. 

That will be the bottoming out of the daylight drop.  Once we pass December 21, we will begin to add daylight each day as we get closer to spring.

August 31st marks the first day since April 12th with a 7 am sunrise.  The sunset will be 8:10 pm.

This will give us 13 hours and 10 minutes of daylight.  The first day of summer had 15 hours and 12 minutes of daylight.

The Perseid meteor shower reached its peak Friday night, but it will still be around this weekend.  Unfortunately, some clouds may spoil the viewing.

Looks towards the northeast sky once it gets totally dark (between about 10 pm and 5 am).  It may be difficult (or not possible) to see if you are in an area with a lot of ground lighting (bigger cities, especially — this is called light pollution).

Here is a link to NASA’s full article on the Perseid meteor shower.

If you’re out any night this week an hour or so after sunset you can look to the western sky to catch a planetary triple play starring Venus, Saturn and Mars.

The first thing skywatchers will see — weather permitting — is the brilliant planet Venus, slightly north of west, in the constellation Gemini. Look for Gemini’s twin first magnitude stars, Pollux and Castor, just above Venus.

As the sky gets darker, the planet Mars can be spotted to Venus’ left as it appears in the constellation Leo very close to the bright, first magnitude star Regulus. Further still to the left will be Saturn shining in the western part of the constellation Virgo.

Click on the sky map above which shows how to spot all three planets as they appear across a 71-degree angle in the night sky. For comparison, your closed fist held at arm’s length covers about 5 degrees of arc in the sky. Venus, Mars and Saturn are all currently appearing slightly north of the ecliptic, the path the sun appears to follow over the year, shown in green in the sky map.

Note the positions of these three planets in relation to the bright background stars, because they are beginning an interesting journey which you will be able to follow over the next two months.
In early July, Venus will have moved rapidly to the left, crossing Cancer into Leo so that now it is next to the star Regulus. Mars, meanwhile, will have moved somewhat to the left. Saturn appears to have hardly moved at all.

By then, the three planets will now cover only 37 degrees in the sky, only half the spread they showed in early June. A month after this, in the first week of August, the planets will be crowded into a 7-degree angle, and Mars will now be to the left of Saturn in Virgo. Venus, too, will have moved into Virgo.
All three will fit comfortably in the viewing field of a small pair of binoculars.

By August, Venus will still be brilliant, but both Saturn and Mars will have faded so that they just barely reach first magnitude. That’s because Saturn and Mars are getting farther away from Earth, while Venus is getting closer.