Wednesday, October 29, 2003

More auroras

Clearly last night was the night to go out in the desert to watch the Auroras. Here's SpaceWeather.com this morning:

A coronal mass ejection swept past Earth today (at approximately 0630 UT on Oct. 29th) and triggered a strong geomagnetic storm. Red and green Northern Lights have been spotted as far south as Midland, Texas, Bishop, California and Enid, Oklahoma. Stay tuned for updates amd images.

That would have been at 10:30pm here in Nevada.

But... there's more:

EXTREME SOLAR ACTIVITY: One of the most powerful solar flares in years erupted from giant sunspot 486 this morning at approximately 1110 UT. The blast measured X17 on the Richter scale of solar flares. As a result of the explosion, a severe S4-class solar radiation storm is underway. Click here to learn how such storms can affect our planet. The explosion also hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth. When it left the sun, the cloud was traveling 2125 km/s (almost 5 million mph). This CME could trigger bright auroras when it sweeps past our plante perhaps as early as tonight.

Watch here for a top-down perspective on the auroral halos around the North and South magnetic poles.

Smoke signals

San Diego Blog is carriyng a huge pile of links to sources of news about the fire there, many leveraged from Joe Crawford's Artlung blog. Emese Gaal has a huge list of blogs with photos. Joe points to The San Diego paper's fireblog as well. To the north, Susan Kitchens continues to cover the situation thoroughly.

If I wasn't on dialup, I'd post (or point to) some "before" pictures of Cuyamaca and other lost places.

Bonus links: Current fire extent maps, and a huge (700+kb) NASA photograph from space.