Bob Zimmerman reports on the January count of sunspots, which continued the recent spiking upward, and on the risks of jumping to conclusions too soon: The uncertainty of knowledge – Behind The Black
Category Archives: Solar Science
Video: Auroras in Abisko National Park February 1st, 2014
From the site of Lights Over Lapland | by Chad & Linnea Blakley comes this beautiful video:
Auroras in Abisko National Park February 1st, 2014 from Lights Over Lapland on Vimeo.
The too quiet sun
I’ve posted occasionally (e.g. see here and here) about the tepid solar activity in what should be a period of awesomely explosive outbursts from our home star. The realization is starting to sink in that this will truly be a very minimal maximum in the solar cycle : Is our Sun falling silent? – BBC (incl. video)
“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.
“If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he says.
And
While the full consequences of a quietening Sun are not fully understood, one thing scientists are certain about is that our star is unpredictable, and anything could happen next.
“This feels like a period where it’s very strange… but also it stresses that we don’t really understand the star that we live with.” says Prof Harrison.
“Because it’s complicated – it’s a complex beast.
===
Check the HobbySpace Sun & Space Weather page for daily solar imagery and data.
A sampling of citizen science at Zooniverse
I scanned blogs of some of the space related citizen science projects at Zooniverse and turned up this items:
- Lunar Launches of 2013 – Moon Zoo – A review of recent lunar missions and a look at what is planned for the next couple of years.
- First Result from Galaxy Zoo Hubble – Galaxy Zoo – An overview of the first published paper to come from the Galaxy Zoo project.
- What Do We Really Understand About Planetary Formation? – Planet Hunters – A discussion of theories of planet formation.
- New Data, New Look: A Brand New Milky Way Project – The Milky Way Project – After completing the initial project, a new one has started.
- Moving a Giant Telescope for Space Warps – Space Warps – A big telescope looks at a candidate for a gravitational lens found by Space Warps
- The “Manhattan” region on Mars – Planet Four Blog – Citizen explorers of Mars are looking at the south pole
Fans in the Manhattan region of the south pole of Mars
====
This is an old blog post from 2012 but the video looks cool: See your data analysis like never before! – Solar Stormwatch Blog
An animation of data scaled from images of the NASA STEREO Heliospheric Imagers by members of the Citizen Science project Solar Stormwatch. For more information, or to participate in the project, visit www.solarstormwatch.com
The sun perks up
The sun shook off some of its lethargy in December. Bob Zimmerman gives an update on the entry in the solar cycle data: Yippee! Solar scientists finally get it right – Behind The Black.
===
A big solar flare this week led to the delay of the Orbital Sciences Antares launch of the Cygnus cargo delivery to the ISS: Orbital Sciences Launch to Space Station with NASA Research Reset for Thursday | NASA
![x1s2_anim[1]](https://i0.wp.com/hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/x1s2_anim1.gif)
More at Spaceweather.com – Jan.8.14.