Fire in the SkyS


Sun

Rare ring of fire eclipse to appear over North America May 2012

Get out your calendar and make a big exclamation point on May 20. That's when an annular solar eclipse will turn the sun into a glowing ring of fire. This is the first solar eclipse visible from the United States in about 18 years, according to NASA. We've had our share of lunar eclipses in recent years, but solar eclipses happen when the moon passes in front of the sun, obscuring it from view.
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© Reuters/China Daily
The "ring of fire" effect will be visible as far north as Medford, Oregon and as far south as Lubbock, Texas. Throughout the zone - called the "path of annularity" - sky watchers will see the sun transformed into a a bright doughnut-like object.

Meteor

US: Meteor hurtled over Texas on Wednesday night


Witnesses spotted it from Oklahoma City to south of Waco

At about 8 p.m. on Wednesday night, a meteor zipped across the sky over Dallas, then burst into a streaking flame before burning out.

WFAA received more than 200 reports, and a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman confirmed that it was likely a meteor or meteorite. Sightings extended from as far north as Oklahoma City to south of Waco. Some heard a boom. On its Wednesday night broadcast, CBS 11 described it as an "electrophonic" meteor -- one that can be heard as it burns.

Comments on WFAA's Facebook page came from The Colony, Rockwall, and beyond, each describing it slightly differently: as a "large blue and green ball with a orange tail," as "bright green," and as "real bright blue with a long fire trail behind it."

I actually saw it as it burned out. In what was undoubtedly an optical illusion, it looked like it was coming from south of downtown Dallas and moving in a northeast direction, as if headed for White Rock Lake. I happened to be watching a performance online by Bjork from Tuesday night's The Colbert Report. She sang "Cosmogony," a song from her new album Biophilia and I was trying to figure out the lyrics.

Meteor

Comet Garradd to Make Closest Approach to Earth in March

Astrophotographers, ready your cameras. On Friday morning, February 3rd, Comet Garradd (C/2009 P1) will pass approximately 0.5 degrees from globular cluster M92 in Hercules. Last night, Rolando Ligustri took this picture of the converging pair using a remotely-controlled 106mm telescope in New Mexico:

Comet Garradd
© Rolando LigustriNew image of the comet Garradd, ever closer to the globular cluster M92. In this case, I have worked with a greater resolution in such a way as to able to appreciate all the dozens of small galaxies present in the photo. apo 106/530 STL11000 L=600s in bin 1 RGB=60s each in bin2.
The ten minute exposure shows the comet's fan-shaped dust tail, which roughly traces the comet's orbit, and its pencil-thin gas tail, which points almost directly away from the sun due to the action of the solar wind.

The star cluster and the comet are both located in the constellation Hercules, high overhead in northern hemisphere skies before sunrise. Sky and Telescope offers a sky map of the comet's path. Observers with computerized GOTO telescopes can track the comet by plugging in orbital elements from the Minor Planet Center.

At the moment, Comet Garradd has an astronomical magnitude of +6.5, invisible to the naked eye but an easy target for backyard telescopes. Forecasters expect it to brighten by a factor of ~2 in the weeks ahead as the comet approaches Earth for a 1.3 AU close encounter in early March. This could be a good time to invest in a Comet Hunter.

Meteor

German art dealers trying to steal El Chaco meteor from Argentina

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El Chaco meteorite in the midst of a Moqoit ceremony
An unlikely alliance between the native Moqoit people and leading Argentine scientists has thwarted plans to ship the world's second largest meteorite to Germany as a prestigious art exhibit.

The 37-ton space rock crashed to Earth as part of a meteor shower between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, forming a giant 48,000 square kilometer crater field in northeastern Argentina known as Campo del Cielo, or Field of the Sky.

Named El Chaco after the province it fell into, the meteorite is central to the world view of the native Moqoit people, many of whose legends, passed down from generation to generation, are based on the meteor shower.

The Moqoit First Nation was decimated following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century and today there are only about 15,000 natives left, living mainly in far northeastern Argentina.

A controversy erupted when the Chaco provincial legislature in December approved a request by a pair of Buenos Aires-based artists to ship the meteorite to Germany to feature in the Documenta modern art exhibition.

Meteor

Canada: Halifax 'fireball' probably a meteor

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File photo
An expert on astronomy says the glowing fireball that some Halifax residents saw streaking through the sky Thursday night was probably a meteor.

Alan Strauss at the Mount Lemmon Sky Center in Arizona says these spectacular fireballs are quite common.

However, Strauss says people often miss them because they just don't look up that much.

Comment: That or they just have incredibly short memories. This is from January 2009:

Canada: Halifax, Nova Scotia - Ball of Fire

The fiery object appeared to travel from west to east over the Halifax area at around 9:30pm.

Question

South Carolina, US: More Questions than Answers in Mysterious South Congaree Boom

South Carolina - In a quiet little town like South Congaree, when something happens, everybody knows about it. Even if they don't exactly know what it was.

"People are curious," said Betty Fairbanks, a resident. "We'd like to know what went on what it was."

The incident happened Sunday morning around 8:00am when the sleepy town was shaken out of bed by some kind of loud boom.

"At first we thought a big tree limb had fallen on the house," said Fairbanks. "It shook the house."

Police Chief Jason Amodio says calls came in from a 4 mile radius, but no reports of damage or injury. But, most importantly, no cause.

"We've talked to several people about it we even called the Cayce quarry, but there's no indication of any kind of quarrying going on that time of day or that would even be loud enough to be heard in the town if it was," said Amodio.

Meteor

USGS monitors Earth's magnetic field to prepare citizens for magnetic storms

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© USGSThe arc of light heading towards the earth is a coronoal mass ejection, which impacts the earth's magnetic field (shown in purple), causing magnetic storms.
Everyone is familiar with weather systems on Earth like rain, wind and snow. But space weather - variable conditions in the space surrounding Earth - has important consequences for our lives inside Earth's atmosphere.

Solar activity occurring miles outside Earth's atmosphere, for example, can trigger magnetic storms on Earth. These storms are visually stunning, but they can set our modern infrastructure spinning.

On Jan. 19, scientists saw a solar flare in an active region of the Sun, along with a concentrated blast of solar-wind plasma and magnetic field lines known as a coronal mass ejection that burst from the Sun's surface and appeared to be headed for Earth.

When these solar winds met Earth's magnetic field, the interaction created one of the largest magnetic storms on Earth recorded in the past few years. The storm peaked on Jan. 24, just as another storm began.

"These new storms, and the storm we witnessed on Sept 26, 2011, indicate the up-tick in activity coming with the Earth's ascent into the next solar maximum," said USGS geophysicist Jeffrey Love." This solar maximum is the period of greatest activity in the solar cycle of the Sun, and it is predicted to occur sometime in 2013, which will increase the amount of magnetic storms on Earth.

Comment: There may be several reasons why scientists are studying earth's magnetic field: New Sott Report: Strange Noises in the Sky: Trumpets of the Apocalypse?


Meteor

Video: What was that thing?! Enormous fireball entering atmosphere over Northern Europe on Christmas Eve 2011


Meteor

Rhode Island, US: Extremely bright 'unexpected' meteor caught on camera

Rare Fireball Meteor caught on Camera by Ladd Observatory in Rhode Island - Jan 19, 2012

"Last week, scientists at Brown University's Ladd Observatory noticed something very unusual showing up on their overnight sky camera.

The skies in Providence were clear on January 19 when a fireball meteor appeared around 3 a.m.

The camera, mounted on the roof of Observatory rolls overnight automatically and often records expected meteor showers. But this one was a pleasant surprise."


Comment: A rare event? Somebody hasn't been keeping up with SOTT.net!


Meteor

These Pesky Cometary...err...Satellite Fragments: Space Station's Orbit Raised to Avoid Collision with Space Junk

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© NASAInternational Space Station
Specialists of Russia's Mission Control Center raised the orbit altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) in the early hours of Sunday to prevent a possible collision with a Chinese satellite fragment, a spokesman for the Center said.

"The maneuver was performed using Zvezda service module engines," the spokesman said.

The altitude of the ISS orbit was raised by 1.7 kilometers to 391.6 kilometers, he said, adding that the maneuver lasted 64 seconds.