Aurora Surprise: Northern Lights in the USA

Source - Space Weather News for June 1, 2013: http://spaceweather.com

AURORA SURPRISE:  Last night, Northern Lights spilled across the Canadian border and descended into the contiguous United States as far south as Colorado and Nebraska.  The display was caused by the unexpected arrival of an interplanetary shock wave on May 31st.  Check http://spaceweather.com for pictures of the display and the odds of a repeat performance tonight.

DID YOU MISS THE STORM?  Next time get a wake-up call.  Aurora and solar flare alerts are available from http://spaceweathertext.com (text) and http://spaceweatherphone.com (voice).

Article of interest: "Canada Explores New Frontiers in Astroinformatics"

There is a really interesting article by Nicole Hemsoth entitled "Canada Explores New Frontiers in Astroinformatics"on how Canada is using cloud computing to handle all the astronomical data now being made available to it's astronomers due to advances in instrumentation.

Here is a quote from the article:

"Researchers Nicholas Ball and David Schade discussed the concept of astroinformatics in detail, stating that, “in the past two decades, astronomy has gone from being starved for data to being flooded by it. This onslaught has now reached the stage where the exploitation of these data has become a named discipline in its own right…This naming follows in analogy from the already established fields of bio- and geoinformatics, which contain their own journals and funding."

I first came across this article first on the High Performance Computing (HPC) Group on Linkedin, and then again on Slashdot, and I thought I would point it out to the readers of this blog. If you are like me and have an interest in both astronomy and computers then take a few minutes and read this excellent article.