It’s acting up again. In late October it was quite busy with flares and coronal mass ejections that subsequently impacted the Earth’s magnetosphere — and subsquently lit up our skies with auroral displays, disrupted communications and other services, and generally made solar and atmospheric physicists very happy with lots of new data to study. You thought it was over, right? Well, not quite. As it turns out, with the Sun, what goes around comes around. And, the sunspot regions that were responsible for the last space weather storm, that rotated around to the other side of the Sun, are on their way back. In fact, this image from SOHO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) shows the three regions (in bright white) that are going to make life interesting for everybody for the next week or so.
Does this mean we’ll be seeing more aurorae, tracking more flares, battening down the electronic hatches to save our satellites from heavy spaceweather? Maybe. There was another flare last week that lit the skies with aurorae, and chances are it’ll happen again. So, keep your eyes peeled, visit the SOHO site, and Spaceweather.com for regular updates on what the Sun is doing.
