Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
August 27, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
August 27, 2014
-Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras. Currently, solar wind conditions favor geomagnetic activity at high-latitudes, sparking Northern Lights bright enough to shine through the late-summer twilight. Mike Theiss sends this picture from the east coast of Iceland. "The lights were incredible," says Theiss. "They changed intensity on and off for about 3 hours on Aug. 27th."
These auroras signal the arrival of a CME launched toward Earth on Aug. 22nd. As NOAA analysts predicted, the solar wind speed did not change much in response to the CME. However, the storm cloud contained a south-pointing magnetic field that opened a crack in Earth's magnetosphere. Solar wind is pouring in to fuel the ongoing display.
-orking over the weekend, Rosetta mission planners and scientists narrowed a list of 10 candidate landing sites to only 5. They are circled in this image of the core of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In mid-November, Rosetta's Philae lander will attempt to touch down in one of these locations--the first time humankind has ever landed a probe on the core of a comet.
The candidate sites are distributed as follows: three (I, B and J) on the comet's smaller lobe and two (A and C) on the larger. The comet's canyon-like neck has been excluded. All of the candidate landing sites provide at least six hours of daylight per comet rotation and offer some flat terrain. According to the ESA, every site has the potential for unique scientific discoveries by the lander's 10 instruments.
A full discussion of each site may be found in this ESA press release. By September 14th, the five candidates will have been assessed and ranked, leading to the selection of a primary landing site, for which a fully detailed strategy for the landing operations will be developed, along with a backup.
Astro Picture of the Day:
August 27, 2014
Source:
The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake. The colorful pool of water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Illuminated artificially, the colors are caused by layers of bacteria that grow in the hot spring. Steam rises off the spring, heated by a magma chamber deep underneath known as the Yellowstone hotspot. Unrelated and far in the distance, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arches high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars. The above picture is a 16-image panorama taken late last month. If the Yellowstone hotspot causes another supervolcanic eruption as it did 640,000 years ago, a large part of North America would be affected.