It’s
omnipresent on Earth and absent on the Moon. When it’s blowing sand in our eyes
or frigid air down our necks, we may curse the wind, but living on a planet
without it would be stultifying. Join us as we sail through a discussion with
journalist and author Simon Winchester about the many practical and playful
uses of wind – from boats to turbines to kites – and how it has shaped history,
including the growth of civilization itself.
For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.
NASA's STEREO spacecraft and new data processing techniques have succeeded in tracking space weather events from their origin in the Sun's ultrahot corona to impact with the Earth 96 million miles away, resolving a 40-year mystery about the structure of the structures that cause space weather: how the structures that impact the Earth relate to the corresponding structures in the solar corona.
Despite many instruments that monitor the Sun and a fleet of near-earth probes, the connection between near-Earth disturbances and their counterparts on the Sun has been obscure, because CMEs and the solar wind evolve and change during the 96,000,000 mile journey from the Sun to the Earth.
STEREO includes "heliospheric imager" cameras that monitor the sky at large angles from the Sun, but the starfield and galaxy are 1,000 times brighter than the faint rays of sunlight reflected by free-floating electron clouds inside CMEs and the solar wind; this has made direct imaging of these important structures difficult or impossible, and limited understanding of the connection between space storms and the coronal structures that cause them.
Newly released imagery reveals absolute brightness of detailed features in a large geoeffective CME in late 2008, connecting the original magnetized structure in the Sun's corona to the intricate anatomy of an interplanetary storm as it impacted the Earth three days later. At the time the data were collected, in late 2008, STEREO-A was nearly 45 degrees ahead of the Earth in its orbit, affording a very clear view of the Earth-Sun line.
The Cloudymidnights blog is intended to support and help promote the Cloudynights.com site, which is a web site for both climatically challenged and visually impaired astronomy enthusiasts.
Admittedly the site is in need of a lot of work, and I hope to do a major upgrade to the site once I improve my HTML and CSS skills.
Until then, this blog will serve as the primary focus of my efforts to help those astronomy enthusiasts who are either climatically challenged or visually impaired.
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