As Americans and their families head into Thanksgiving week, the Sun is getting in on the act by showing off several huge sunspot groups that are candidates for solar flares over the next few days. In addition to the SOHO and Spaceweather.com websites for updates on geomagnetic activity and aurora forecasts, you can also surf over to Space Weather Now.
These sites are your best sources for “up to the minute” space weather information. Here’s what Spaceweather.com has to say on Sunday, November 23, 2003:
SOLAR OUTLOOK: Big sunspot 488 has a complex “beta-delta-gamma” magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class solar flares. Any explosions from the active region this week would be Earth-directed, which raises the possibility of more solar storms and auroras in the days ahead.
And, over at Space Weather Now you can check out the size of the auroral ovals. Here’s an example of a North Pole auroral oval on Sunday, November 23.
Courtesy of the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory — this image is updated frequently so you can follow the progress of these active regions across the solar disk. (SOHO)
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.
