Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
October 29, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
October 29, 2014
-NASA's vision for future space flight includes using private companies to conduct routine launches of food and supplies to the International Space Station. Tuesday night's explosion of an Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) supply rocket reminds us that nothing about space flight is routine. "Launching rockets is an incredibly difficult undertaking," said NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier after watching the spacecraft turn into a fireball moments after liftoff. Despite this setback, the US commercial space program seems to have a bright future. OSC successfully sent two rockets to the space station earlier this year, and SpaceX has sent four since 2012. Orbital's Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson says, "We will conduct a thorough investigation immediately to determine the cause of this failure and what steps can be taken to avoid a repeat of this incident."
-The biggest sunspot in nearly 25 years is about to leave the solar disk. This picture from Sergio Castillo of Corona CA shows AR2192 approaching the western limb on Oct. 27th. "For its final trick, AR2192 is going to treat us by mimicking a Giant Skull," says Castillo, one of many readers who has noted the resemblance between the sunspot and a skeletal face. "Say Happy Halloween as it gets ready to turn away from us. "
As AR2192 approaches the sun's horizon, it is no longer facing Earth. However, the odds of an Earth-directed radiation storm are higher than ever. The reason is, the western limb of the sun is well-connected to Earth. Solar magnetic fields springing out of that region spiral back to our planet. If a sunspot passing through the area explodes, those spiralling magnetic fields can funnel energetic particles in our direction.
In only a few days, the behemoth sunspot will begin a 2-week transit of the far side of the sun, carried around by the sun's 27-day rotation. However, that doesn't mean we've seen the last of this magnificent active region. Big sunspots typically persist for two or three solar rotations before they decay. After it departs in October, AR2192 will probaby return in November.
Astro Picture of the Day:
October 29, 2014
Source:
Sometimes your eclipse viewing goes bad in an interesting way. While watching and photographing last Thursday's partial solar eclipse, a popular astronomy blogger suffered through long periods of clouds blocking the Sun. Unexpectedly, however, a nearby cloud began to show a rare effect: iridescence. Frequently part of a more familiar solar corona effect, iridescence is the diffraction of sunlight around a thin screen of nearly uniformly-sized water droplets. Different colors of the sunlight become deflected by slightly different angles and so come to the observer from slightly different directions. This display, featured here, was quite bright and exhibited an unusually broad range of colors. On the right, the contrails of an airplane are also visible.