Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
February 4, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
February 4, 2014
-Jupiter's moon Io disappears behind Jupiter's western limb around 8:57 p.m. EST. Twenty minutes later, Jupiter's Great Red Spot crosses the planet's central meridian. Finally, Io reappears out of eclipse from Jupiter's shadow, just east of the planet, around 11:56 p.m. EST (8:56 p.m. PST).
-NOAA forecasters estimate an 80% chance of M-flares and a 50% chance of X-flares on Feb. 4th. The source would be giant sunspot AR1967, shown here seething with activity in a photo from amateur astronomer Sergio Castillo of Inglewood, California.
In Castillo's photo, a pair of magnetic filaments reaches out from the heart of the active region, where multiple dark cores big enough to swallow Earth are crackling with flares. "The activity in this region is just amazing," says Castillo.
AR1967 has an unstable 'delta-class' magnetic field that harbors energy for strong flares and CMEs. Any eruptions today will surely be Earth-directed as the active region crosses the center of the solar disk.
Astro Picture of the Day:
February 4, 2014
Source:
If you visit HH 24, don't go near the particle beam jet. This potential future travel advisory might be issued because the powerful jet likely contains electrons and protons moving hundreds of kilometers per second. The above image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in infrared light in order to better understand turbulent star forming regions known as Young Stellar Objects (YSOs). Frequently when a star forms, a disk of dust and gas circles the YSO causing a powerful central jets to appear. In this case, the energetic jets are creating, at each end, Herbig-Haro object 24 (HH 24), as they slam into the surrounding interstellar gas. The entire star forming region lies about 1,500 light years distant in the Orion B molecular cloud complex. Due to their rarity, jets like that forming HH 24 are estimated to last only a few thousand years.