Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
September 18, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
September 18, 2014
-A minor CME expected to hit Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 17th apparently did not. Either it sailed wide of our planet or its impact was too puny to detect. With no CME to rattle Earth's magnetic field, NOAA forecasters have downgraded the chances of a geomagnetic storm today to only 20%.
-Iceland's largest volcano is restless. The Bardarbunga volcano system, located under the massive Vatnajoekull glacier, has been rocked by hundreds of tremors daily since mid-August. Lava is currently spewing from fissures, prompting fears of a much larger eruption. Local photographers, meanwhile, are having a great time recording a rare mix of lava-red and aurora-green in the night sky. Thorsten Boeckel sends this photo from Mývatn, Iceland. "The red shine of the fissure eruption together with the green aurora provided a phantastic view," he says.
A full-fledged eruption of this volcano has the potential to be even more disruptive than the 2010 eruption of nearby Eyjafjallajokull, which threw air traffic into chaos across Europe. According to the Icelandic Met Office, there are no signs of decreasing magma output as of Sept. 17th. This means more lava is in the offing--along with more phantastic photo-ops as aurora season unfolds around the Arctic Circle.
Astro Picture of the Day:
September 18, 2014
Source:
In this crowded starfield covering over 2 degrees within the high flying constellation Cygnus, the eye is drawn to the Cocoon Nebula. A compact star forming region, the cosmic Cocoon punctuates a long trail of obscuring interstellar dust clouds. Cataloged as IC 5146, the nebula is nearly 15 light-years wide, located some 4,000 light years away. Like other star forming regions, it stands out in red, glowing, hydrogen gas excited by the young, hot stars and blue, dust-reflected starlight at the edge of an otherwise invisible molecular cloud. In fact, the bright star near the center of this nebula is likely only a few hundred thousand years old, powering the nebular glow as it clears out a cavity in the molecular cloud's star forming dust and gas. But the long dusty filaments that appear dark in this visible light image are themselves hiding stars in the process of formation that can be seen seen at infrared wavelengths.