Nevertheless, there has continued to be solar eruptions leading to brilliant aurora on earth:
NO SUNSPOTS, NO PROBLEM: A minor G1-class geomagnetic storm is underway on Oct. 15th. This marks the 5th consecutive day that polar geomagnetic storms have been observed–a remarkable string considering that there are NO SUNSPOTS on the face of the sun. It just goes to show that blank suns can indeed produce stormy space weather. Arctic sky watchers should remain alert for auroras as the solar wind continues to blow faster than 550 km/s.
Fires broke out quickly this past weekend in northern California. Sixty mile an hour winds did nothing to help either quell or stop the runaway fires from jumping fire lines and decimating whole neighborhoods. Dry, hot conditions which have been problematic for much of the west coast this summer erupted into flames after a series of lightning strikes. October is always a difficult time in California for wildfires, but this year, the wildfire eruptions seem extreme even to the most seasoned Californian. The deadly combination of lightning, winds, and hot weather which dries the landscape into tinder is all it takes to set off a wildfire that will consume thousands and thousands of acres in just a few short hours.
Fifteen fires ignited late Sunday evening, remained mostly uncontained, and are likely to continue spreading because of heat, low humidity and wind with many of these fires located in Sonoma Valley and Napa Valley, heart of California’s wine country. Despite the massive number of firefighters deployed to fight the flames, most fires remain 0% contained at present. Too many other factors are in play that make containment difficult including high winds, dry conditions, and low humidity.
NASA’s Aqua satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on October 09, 2017. Actively burning areas (hot spots), detected by MODIS’s thermal bands, are outlined in red. Each hot spot is an area where the thermal detectors on the MODIS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by plumes of smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for fire.NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC. Caption by Lynn Jenner
FireSat is a project started at NASA JPL to develop a constellation of satellites with sensors specialized at spotting wildfires. The goal is to detect and report a wildfire anywhere in the world within 15 minutes of its starting.
The FireSat sensors would be able to detect fires that are at least 35 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) wide, within an average of 15 minutes from the time they begin. Within three minutes of detecting a fire from orbit, FireSat would notify emergency responders in the area of the fire, improving support for time-critical response decisions.
The sensors and their associated products for data analysis would also be able to locate explosions, oil spills and other dangerous events involving high heat around the globe.
On January 21, [Jose-Luis Ortiz of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain] and colleagues used 12 telescopes at 10 observatories to peer into the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, and watch Haumea block the light of a distant star. That tiny eclipse let the team measure the dwarf planet’s size, shape and surrounding environment more accurately than ever before.
Haumea turned out to be larger — its long axis stretches at least 2,322 kilometers, a bit more than half the width of the contiguous United States — and less dense than previously thought, the team reports October 11 in Nature. To their surprise, the researchers also saw the background star flicker before and after its light was blocked by Haumea itself. That flicker is consistent with a 70-kilometer-wide ring about 1,000 kilometers above the dwarf planet’s surface.
We know giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have rings, but thus far, we’ve only found them around two small worlds. Chariklo is about 250 kilometers wide, and has two rings, while Chiron, about the same size, is also suspected to have a ring. Both Chariklo and Chiron are Centaurs, small worlds orbiting the Sun between the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt, crisscrossing the giant planets’ orbits.
With today’s announcement, Haumea becomes the first, small, non-Centaur known to have a ring, and the farthest ring world we’ve found in our solar system.
An artist’s rendering of how the ring around Haumea might look.
The company Unistellar is developing a small telescope called the evScope that includes an active light amplification system that greatly brightens and sharpens images:
Turn the Amplified Vision ON and the system will start to accumulate light from the objects you are viewing all the while projecting it directly into the eyepiece of the telescope: the image is progressively intensified and in a matter of seconds colors and shapes of galaxies and nebulae, invisible in normal telescopes, will appear. Turn Field Recognition ON and the system will recognize and name the objects in the field !
Called the “eVscope” (pronounced Ee-Vee Scope) for short, Unistellar’s product outwardly appears to be just a typical 4.5-inch Newtonian reflector—a simple small telescope that, along with its tripod, easily fits inside a backpack. But a peek through its eyepiece reveals the eVscope’s power: Using a proprietary system of sensors, optics and specialized software, the telescope can amplify and display the accumulated light from a faint target over time, stacking up and processing hundreds of images to correct for instrumental jitter and smeared exposures to build up vivid, sharp views that rival those from far larger and more expensive equipment. And, as Marchis intends to show with his demonstration from a Brooklyn graveyard, the technology even works under poor viewing conditions—such as in and around New York City, where the glare of city lights is so oppressive that even on clear nights one can practically count on fingers and toes all the stars visible to the naked eye. (The technology works so well, in fact, that Unistellar’s eVscope has managed to capture and display images of faraway Pluto in its eyepiece as a dim and distant dot hanging in the light-polluted skies over Marseilles, France, and San Francisco.)
The evScope is sensitive enough for amateurs to do real science with it. The company plans to encourage citizen science projects with the device:
Through a partnership with the SETI Institute, eVscope users will have the option of automatically uploading their observations to an online database for use by amateur and professional astronomers alike. “We’ll build it up slowly, with a thousand eVscopes providing millions of frames for any given region of sky that can be combined to get good signal to noise,” Marchis says. “We could use it to search for Earth-threatening asteroids and comets, stellar occultations, supernovae, variable stars; maybe even things we can scarcely imagine—a flash of light, a laser pulse from another cosmic civilization? Who knows what we might find—it’s not like we have been observing the sky continuously at these magnitudes.”
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Unistellar plans to begin selling the evScope in 2018.
