It's very late - going on 1:00am now, so this will be very short. I wish I could capture a picture off the site but I don't know how - it won't right click so I can save it. But here Aurora Sky Station is a live webcam of the night sky in Sweden. Right now as I write, a beautiful aurora is dancing across the sky. Oh - I want so much to be there and see it!!
All for now. Mel has been in bed for almost half an hour already. I've a lot to write about - just need to have the time to do it. Hopefully tomorrow!!
Showing posts with label aurora. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aurora. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Solar Minimum Continues
After mentioning on my blog yesterday that the solar minimum is continuing, SpaceWeather.com had another article from NASA about just that very thing today.
Are Sunspots Disappearing?
No one really knows for sure what is going on with the sun. There is a lot of speculation within the scientific world. There is a lot of speculation within the "fringe" world as well. I find some of the fringe stuff amusing. I find some of the scientific guesses intriguing. Whatever is really happening - well, we will find out sooner or later.
How did I become interested in sunspots, you ask? Good question!
Way back when I lived in Alaska I fell in love with the aurora borealis - the Northern Lights. Uh huh! Whew! I've written about that all before so won't go into it. North of Fairbanks is a place where they study the aurora - Poker Flats. Which thought reminds me that I need to check and see if they have their live camera up and running again now that it actually gets dark in Alaska at night again! My sister wrote the other night that she'd seen a band of green aurora while she was out. I know people in other northern parts of the world have also been seeing them because photos are being posted on the web.
I can remember hearing that scientists thought the aurora was created by sunspots. Now the theories are slightly different, but that is what caught my attention with sunspots. From learning about what they are and what causes them, well, that is how my continuing interest developed.
I would love to go into space. I would love to have the scientific brain to thoroughly study the sun, with access to all of the modern and future technology that is and will be available.
I wonder if in the new heaven and new earth we will do such things? Wouldn't that be marvelous?!
No one really knows for sure what is going on with the sun. There is a lot of speculation within the scientific world. There is a lot of speculation within the "fringe" world as well. I find some of the fringe stuff amusing. I find some of the scientific guesses intriguing. Whatever is really happening - well, we will find out sooner or later.
How did I become interested in sunspots, you ask? Good question!
Way back when I lived in Alaska I fell in love with the aurora borealis - the Northern Lights. Uh huh! Whew! I've written about that all before so won't go into it. North of Fairbanks is a place where they study the aurora - Poker Flats. Which thought reminds me that I need to check and see if they have their live camera up and running again now that it actually gets dark in Alaska at night again! My sister wrote the other night that she'd seen a band of green aurora while she was out. I know people in other northern parts of the world have also been seeing them because photos are being posted on the web.
I can remember hearing that scientists thought the aurora was created by sunspots. Now the theories are slightly different, but that is what caught my attention with sunspots. From learning about what they are and what causes them, well, that is how my continuing interest developed.
I would love to go into space. I would love to have the scientific brain to thoroughly study the sun, with access to all of the modern and future technology that is and will be available.
I wonder if in the new heaven and new earth we will do such things? Wouldn't that be marvelous?!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Dreams
Sometimes I have the strangest dreams. I dream every night and I remember almost 100% of my dreams, at least when I first wake up. After the first few moments they usually fade away. However, there are some dreams that stick in my mind 'forever'.
One of those dreams happened when I lived in Alaska. It was summer and 24 hour daylight. In winter I loved going out and watching the northern lights dance and play across the sky whenever they happened to be out. Well, seeing as how it was summer and 24 hour daylight - there were no northern lights to be seen. Just blue sky, or cloudy sky as the case may be. That one summer night I dreamed a very, very vivid dream.
I dreamed the aurora was out and I was watching it and loving it and enjoying it and being totally amazed by it. When I woke up I was totally amazed as well. Why? Because this is what I dreamed the aurora was:
I laughed so hard. I remember trying to describe it to Mel. My dream could have come straight out of the movie, Fantasia. A chorus line of little pink dancing pigs, lined up across a dark night sky, stars twinkling behind them, their little legs and feet pumping up and down as they danced in unison, arms across each other's backs. It still makes me smile. I've actually had the dream a couple times since then!
Why did I dream such a thing? !!! I do NOT think of the aurora normally as a chorus line of dancing pink pigs. :)
Last night I dreamed I saw the noctilucent clouds for the first time. My dreams are always long and convoluted, that's for sure, but somewhere toward the end of this dream I went outside, looked up and saw the clouds in the sky. They started as a little white 'puff' of cloud in a night sky that grew into a whirling, dancing cloud of light which covered a large portion of the sky.
Now I have a fairly good idea as to why I dreamed this particular part of the dream (the rest of the dream - I have no idea why that all happened) - I really, really want to see the noctilucent clouds AND over the past 36 hours we have been in a solar storm
which produced aurora sightings in area where it actually gets dark this time of year. The photo in the following article is very much like what I dreamed, only these aurora have much more color.
AURORA SURPRISE: Sometimes the auroras are so bright, you just can't sleep. "I was up all night on July 21st, but it was totally worth it!" says photographer Zoltan Kenwell of Chip Lake, Alberta. This is what kept him awake:
"It was a very impressive show that lasted 4.5 hours!" says Kenwell.
Forecasters did not predict this display. It began on when a seemingly minor solar wind stream hit Earth's magnetic field. The minor hit turned into a not-so-minor display because a crack opened in Earth's magnetic field, allowing solar wind to pour in and fuel the storm. Northern Lights descended as far south as the Dakotas, Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin. The solar wind is still blowing, but the crack has closed, bringing an end to the lights. article in spaceweather.com
I love my dreams!!
(Above graph found at: 3-day Estimated Planetary Kp-Index Monitor)
One of those dreams happened when I lived in Alaska. It was summer and 24 hour daylight. In winter I loved going out and watching the northern lights dance and play across the sky whenever they happened to be out. Well, seeing as how it was summer and 24 hour daylight - there were no northern lights to be seen. Just blue sky, or cloudy sky as the case may be. That one summer night I dreamed a very, very vivid dream.
I dreamed the aurora was out and I was watching it and loving it and enjoying it and being totally amazed by it. When I woke up I was totally amazed as well. Why? Because this is what I dreamed the aurora was:
I laughed so hard. I remember trying to describe it to Mel. My dream could have come straight out of the movie, Fantasia. A chorus line of little pink dancing pigs, lined up across a dark night sky, stars twinkling behind them, their little legs and feet pumping up and down as they danced in unison, arms across each other's backs. It still makes me smile. I've actually had the dream a couple times since then!Why did I dream such a thing? !!! I do NOT think of the aurora normally as a chorus line of dancing pink pigs. :)
Last night I dreamed I saw the noctilucent clouds for the first time. My dreams are always long and convoluted, that's for sure, but somewhere toward the end of this dream I went outside, looked up and saw the clouds in the sky. They started as a little white 'puff' of cloud in a night sky that grew into a whirling, dancing cloud of light which covered a large portion of the sky.
Now I have a fairly good idea as to why I dreamed this particular part of the dream (the rest of the dream - I have no idea why that all happened) - I really, really want to see the noctilucent clouds AND over the past 36 hours we have been in a solar storm
which produced aurora sightings in area where it actually gets dark this time of year. The photo in the following article is very much like what I dreamed, only these aurora have much more color.AURORA SURPRISE: Sometimes the auroras are so bright, you just can't sleep. "I was up all night on July 21st, but it was totally worth it!" says photographer Zoltan Kenwell of Chip Lake, Alberta. This is what kept him awake:
"It was a very impressive show that lasted 4.5 hours!" says Kenwell.Forecasters did not predict this display. It began on when a seemingly minor solar wind stream hit Earth's magnetic field. The minor hit turned into a not-so-minor display because a crack opened in Earth's magnetic field, allowing solar wind to pour in and fuel the storm. Northern Lights descended as far south as the Dakotas, Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin. The solar wind is still blowing, but the crack has closed, bringing an end to the lights. article in spaceweather.com
I love my dreams!!
(Above graph found at: 3-day Estimated Planetary Kp-Index Monitor)
Friday, July 03, 2009
Baby, It's Hot Outside
Baby, it's HOT outside - which is a take-off on the song, "Baby, It's Cold Outside". But it is - it is hot out there. That is why I am IN here. :) With a fan blowing on me. With the a/c working in the livingroom. And still it is 83 degrees in this room by the desk. Whew! I need to drink some more water.
Yesterday on spaceweather.com there was an interesting photo. ART OR SCIENCE? Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, have created an unprecedented 3D supercomputer model of a sunspot. The result is not only scientifically informative, but also a thing of beauty:
To create the virtual sunspot, researchers programmed NCAR's IBM bluefire supercomputer with the laws of magnetohydrodynamics, sprinkled in some ground-based observations of actual sunspots, and hit "go." The bluefire is capable of 76 trillion calculations per second; even so, the program took weeks to complete. The final model contains 1.8 billion points and covers a 3D domain 31,000 miles by 62,000 miles wide and 3,700 miles deep.
Physcists are now studying movies of the virtual sunspot to develop new insights into the dynamic behavior of these planet-sized behemoths. More than one onlooker has gasped in amazement when shown the surprisely lovely subsurface structure of the 'spot.
Is it art or science? You decide.
Well, I don't know if that is art of science, but I do think it's pretty. I also think it causes me to think more about the sun and what is going on up there, way out in space, and how it effects my simple little life here on earth.
All that roiling and boiling, exploding and rotating. All the rays of different sorts that are being thrown out into space: gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet rays and a bunch more that I know nothing about. Magnetic fields, radiation, hydrogen gasses, currents and 'jet streams'. Oh my!
The more I read about our Sun, the more I realize that we take it too much for granted. It's up there in the sky every day. When I'm too hot I complain about it's heat. When it's cloudy too long I complain about it being missing. I long for it's light, but stand outside in the shade whenever possible.
The sun is there every day, day after day after day for millennium. Without it we could not live. Yet I rarely think about it in a positive way. Shame on me! The sun is one of God's good gifts to us!
I need to start thanking Him for it's light, it's heat, it's effect on our seasons - not complaining all the time about being too hot, or too dark, or whatever.
Recently we have been in a deep Solar Minimum - a time when there have been very few sunspots. Sunspots? you ask - what's that? Spots on the sun! heh heh. If you are interested in what they are, what they do and why scientists keep track of them, I encourage you too look them up on the internet. Sunspots are very important, if for no other reason than they are what help the earth have Northern Lights. Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis up in Alaska, well, they are one of the natural wonders of this earth that I love the very most, am very fascinated with them, could stand out in the frigid cold and watch them for hours. Without sunspots - no aurora. Therefore, bring on the sunspots! Away with this Solar Minimum! But all in God's good time - there is a season for everything under the sun!!
Photo yesterday of sun without sunspots:
Photo a few days ago of an unusual line of sunspots:
Can you see them, way down there in the far left 'corner' of the sun but in the center of the photo? Those things are HUGE. You could fit many earths into each one, but they look so tiny on the face of the sun.
And today, on Astronomy Photo of the Day is this photo:
Now seriously, could you tell that the sun is smaller and farther away today than it was two weeks ago? :) ;)
And one last thing to click on, if you are so inclined. A way cool YouTube video of a solar explosion. Wow! Just think - I used to believe it was just a big yellow ball of fire up in the sky, like a big beach ball all smooth and passive and unchanging. Now I know different! (updated - there is another video after this one - scroll down. Both are short ones.)
Why does the Sun flare? Unpredictably, our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar System that can affect satellites, astronauts, and power grids on Earth. This close up of an active region on the Sun that produced a powerful X-class flare was captured by the orbiting TRACE satellite. Clicking on the image should bring up a movie that shows the evolution of Active Region 9906 over about four hours. The glowing gas flowing around the relatively stable magnetic field loops above the Sun's photosphere has a temperature of over ten million degrees Celsius. These flows occurred after violently unstable magnetic reconnection events above the Sun produced the flare. Many things about solar active regions are not well understood including the presence of dark regions that appear to move inward during the movie.
Ok - two last things. I just found this YouTube video from National Geographic. It's only 4 minutes long and more explanitory.
Yesterday on spaceweather.com there was an interesting photo. ART OR SCIENCE? Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, have created an unprecedented 3D supercomputer model of a sunspot. The result is not only scientifically informative, but also a thing of beauty:
To create the virtual sunspot, researchers programmed NCAR's IBM bluefire supercomputer with the laws of magnetohydrodynamics, sprinkled in some ground-based observations of actual sunspots, and hit "go." The bluefire is capable of 76 trillion calculations per second; even so, the program took weeks to complete. The final model contains 1.8 billion points and covers a 3D domain 31,000 miles by 62,000 miles wide and 3,700 miles deep.Physcists are now studying movies of the virtual sunspot to develop new insights into the dynamic behavior of these planet-sized behemoths. More than one onlooker has gasped in amazement when shown the surprisely lovely subsurface structure of the 'spot.
Is it art or science? You decide.
Well, I don't know if that is art of science, but I do think it's pretty. I also think it causes me to think more about the sun and what is going on up there, way out in space, and how it effects my simple little life here on earth.
All that roiling and boiling, exploding and rotating. All the rays of different sorts that are being thrown out into space: gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet rays and a bunch more that I know nothing about. Magnetic fields, radiation, hydrogen gasses, currents and 'jet streams'. Oh my!
The more I read about our Sun, the more I realize that we take it too much for granted. It's up there in the sky every day. When I'm too hot I complain about it's heat. When it's cloudy too long I complain about it being missing. I long for it's light, but stand outside in the shade whenever possible.
The sun is there every day, day after day after day for millennium. Without it we could not live. Yet I rarely think about it in a positive way. Shame on me! The sun is one of God's good gifts to us!
I need to start thanking Him for it's light, it's heat, it's effect on our seasons - not complaining all the time about being too hot, or too dark, or whatever.
Recently we have been in a deep Solar Minimum - a time when there have been very few sunspots. Sunspots? you ask - what's that? Spots on the sun! heh heh. If you are interested in what they are, what they do and why scientists keep track of them, I encourage you too look them up on the internet. Sunspots are very important, if for no other reason than they are what help the earth have Northern Lights. Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis up in Alaska, well, they are one of the natural wonders of this earth that I love the very most, am very fascinated with them, could stand out in the frigid cold and watch them for hours. Without sunspots - no aurora. Therefore, bring on the sunspots! Away with this Solar Minimum! But all in God's good time - there is a season for everything under the sun!!
Photo yesterday of sun without sunspots:
Photo a few days ago of an unusual line of sunspots:
Can you see them, way down there in the far left 'corner' of the sun but in the center of the photo? Those things are HUGE. You could fit many earths into each one, but they look so tiny on the face of the sun.And today, on Astronomy Photo of the Day is this photo:
Now seriously, could you tell that the sun is smaller and farther away today than it was two weeks ago? :) ;)And one last thing to click on, if you are so inclined. A way cool YouTube video of a solar explosion. Wow! Just think - I used to believe it was just a big yellow ball of fire up in the sky, like a big beach ball all smooth and passive and unchanging. Now I know different! (updated - there is another video after this one - scroll down. Both are short ones.)
Why does the Sun flare? Unpredictably, our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar System that can affect satellites, astronauts, and power grids on Earth. This close up of an active region on the Sun that produced a powerful X-class flare was captured by the orbiting TRACE satellite. Clicking on the image should bring up a movie that shows the evolution of Active Region 9906 over about four hours. The glowing gas flowing around the relatively stable magnetic field loops above the Sun's photosphere has a temperature of over ten million degrees Celsius. These flows occurred after violently unstable magnetic reconnection events above the Sun produced the flare. Many things about solar active regions are not well understood including the presence of dark regions that appear to move inward during the movie.
Ok - two last things. I just found this YouTube video from National Geographic. It's only 4 minutes long and more explanitory.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Aurora Borealis
written by: Bill Fries and Chip Davis
One night last summer we were
Camped at ten thousand feet up where the air is clear
High in the Rockies of Lost Lake, Colorado;
And as the fire burned low
And only a few glowing coals remained,
We laid on our backs
All warm in our sleeping bags
And looked up at the stars…
And as I felt myself falling into
The vastness of the universe,
I thought about things…and places…
And times…
I thought about the time my grandma
Told me what to say when I
Saw the evening star…you know…
“Star light…star bright
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight…”
The air is crystal clean up here –
That’s why you can see a million stars.
I remember a time a bunch of us
Were in a canyon of the Green River in Wyoming -
It was a night just like this…
And we had our rafts pulled up on the bank
An’ turned over, so we could sleep on ‘em.
And one of the guys from New York
Said, “Hey! Look at the smog in the sky!
Smog clear out here in the sticks!”
And somebody said…”Hey Joe, that’s not smog…
That’s the Milky Way…”
Joe had never seen the Milky Way…
And we saw the northern lights once,
In the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana…
They’re like flames
From some pre-historic campfire
Leaping and dancing in the sky
And changing colors…
Red to gold…
And blue to violet…Aurora Borealis!
It’s lik the equinox…
The changing seasons…
Summer to fall…
Young to old…
Then to now
And then tomorrow…
And then everyone was asleep
Except me…
And as I saw the morning star
Come up over the mountains,
I realized that life is just a collection
Of memories…
And memories are like starlight…
They go on forever.
__________________________________________
Copyright 1976 American Gramophone (SESAC)
Written by Bill Fries and Chip Davis
From: C. W. McCall’s Greatest Hits
Available at: www.amazon.com
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