The first sprites of summer are starting to appear in the skies of North America. It looks like the sprite season is beginning early this year – summer is almost three months away. Sprites are electrical discharges that come out of the top of thunderclouds,
The active region (AR 1429), the source of many strong flares and geomagnetic storms in the beginning of March 2012, has completed its journey around the Sun and is peaking over the Eastern limb of the Sun. But it is not nearly the behemoth it was four weeks ago.The
Recent research shows that the space age has coincided with a period of unusually high solar activity, called a grand maximum. Isotopes in ice sheets and tree rings tell us that this grand solar maximum is one of 24 during the last 9300 years and suggest the high
Solar activity is currently at low levels. All sunspots on the Earth facing side of the Sun remain stable. A small new sunspot looks to be forming to the west of 1445 in the southern hemisphere. Old and active Sunspot 1429 will begin to re-emerge off the eastern limb
Return of the Sunspot 1429 to Earth side is due in evening hours of March 28th by UTC, meaning further increase of an M-class event.Sunspot 1429 produced a number of significant and strong solar flares during mid March and is still very active. On March 26th
In morning of March 24, a near M-Class flare took place around Sunspot 1445 at around 08:50-09:00 UTC. There was a gap in data on the GOES X-Ray Flux graph, however it was picked up on the EVE Diode X-Ray signal. Comparing it to yesterday’s M1.0, it looks like this
The recent solar activity did more than spark pretty auroras around the poles. Researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years. Although the influx of
Old Sunspot 1431 is now rotating back into view off the southeast limb and is also producing solar flares. So far this afternoon it produced a minor C6.5 flare, followed by a moderate M1.0 event at 19:40 UTC. Various small sunspots did form including regions 1441, 1442
March 20th began with the vernal equinox and ended with this outburst of Spring-green over Tromsø, Norway: Spring is aurora season. For reasons not fully understood by scientists, the weeks around the vernal equinox are prone to Northern Lights. Auroras are
Old Sunspot 1429 continues to be active while transiting the farside of the Sun. This morning (March 21, 2012), AR1429 produced a solar flare which resulted in a bright Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). SOHO photographed the cloud expanding at 1550 km/s (3.5 million
