Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
July 16, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
July 16, 2014
[left]-If you have a dark enough sky, the Milky Way now forms a magnificent arch high across the whole eastern sky after nightfall is complete. It runs all the way from below Cassiopeia in the north-northeast, up and across Cygnus and the Summer Triangle in the east, and down past the spout of the Sagittarius Teapot in the south.
-Ten days ago, the sun was peppered with large spots. Now it is nearly blank. This image taken on July 15th by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a solar disk almost completely devoid of dark cores.
Long-time readers absorbing this image might be reminded of 2008-2009, years when the sun plunged into the deepest solar minimum in a century. The resemblance, however, is only superficial. Underneath the visible surface of the sun, the solar dynamo is still churning out knots of magnetism that will soon bob to the surface to make sunspots. Solar Max is not finished.
For today, though, it has been paused. Solar activity is low, and NOAA forecasters put the odds of an X-class flare at less than 1%.
Astro Picture of the Day:
July 16, 2014
Source:
What happened to half of Saturn? Nothing other than Earth's Moon getting in the way. As pictured above on the far right, Saturn is partly eclipsed by a dark edge of a Moon itself only partly illuminated by the Sun. This year the orbits of the Moon and Saturn have led to an unusually high number of alignments of the ringed giant behind Earth's largest satellite. Technically termed an occultation, the above image captured one such photogenic juxtaposition from Buenos Aires, Argentina that occurred early last week. Visible to the unaided eye but best viewed with binoculars, there are still four more eclipses of Saturn by our Moon left in 2014. The next one will be on August 4 and visible from Australia, while the one after will occur on August 31 and be visible from western Africa at night but simultaneously from much of eastern North America during the day.