Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

Russian Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Comet

Novichonok
© ESORussian amateur astronomer discovers new comet.
Russian amateur astronomer Artyom Novichonok, a student of Petrozavodsk university, made a discovery of a new comet, Russian astronomy popularizing website Astronet said on Sunday.

The comet is the first comet discovered from Russian territory since 1989.

Novichonok's discovery was confirmed by the International Astronomical Union, the comet being designated P/2011 R3 (Novichonok), the Ka-Dar Observatory, where Novichonok made his discovery, said on its website.

Novichonok discovered the comet on 6 images taken in September using a 0.4-m Jigit telescope.

Meteor

North Carolina, US: Cape Fear Weather Watch - See a fireball last night? You're not alone

Did you see a fireball in the eastern sky Thursday evening? You're not the only one.

Emergency dispatchers in New Hanover and Brunswick counties received multiple reports of a blazing object in the sky at about 8 p.m.

Most likely, it was a meteor or comet fragment that made it into the atmosphere, said Tim Armstrong of the National Weather Service's office in Wilmington. There has been no confirmation of that, however.

Sun

Geomagnetic Storm In Progress

A geomagnetic storm is in progress following the impact of a CME around 1130 UT on Sept. 9th. This could be the first of several hits from a series of CMEs expected to reach Earth during the weekend. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras after nightfall.

"After the outbursts of sunspot 1283 hurled several CMEs toward Earth, we expected quite some auroras in the arctic part of Norway," Frank Olsen of Tromsø. "We were not disappointed." He snapped this picture just after local midnight on Sept. 10th:

Norway Auroras
© Frank OlsenImage taken: Sep. 9, 2011
Location: Tromsø, Norway
Norway Auroras_1
© Frank Olsen
Norway Auroras_2
© Frank Olsen

Sun

Solar Activity Update: Geomagnetic Storm Watch September 9th, 2011


Sun

Geomagnetic Storm: Electrical Ground Currents Detected in Norway

A polar geomagnetic storm (Kp=5) is in progress following the impact of a CME around 1100 UT on Sept. 9th. This could be the first of several hits from a series of CMEs expected to reach Earth during the weekend. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras after nightfall.

Image
© Rob StammesInstrument room polar light center, Lofoten Norway
Electrical ground currents caused by the storm have been detected in Norway. Rob Stammes writes:
Today, September 09, 2011 at 12.45 UTC the first CME arrived as a magnetic shockwave on my instruments. There is also an effect in signal strength from my vlf receivers, coming through electrons in the solarwind cloud. The magnetic field is unstable at the moment, it means a big change for auroras coming night.

Meteor

US: Witness describes 'bright blue/green fireball' with long tail in Colorado night sky

MBIQ (Meteor Bot Internet Query) Indicates NE Colorado Meteor Event 2SEP2011

Colorado, east of Greeley and Northeast of Kersey: Bright Blue/Green Meteor Fireball seen at 4:00 am, 2 September 2011
My friend and I were at work out at 70 Ranch located at CR 388 and CR 53 Around 4 O'clock AM...9/2/2011. I saw a light that looked like a shooting star. It was bright out of the North and then it shot like a star to the East and then stopped for a few seconds. Then it came down from the north going south and then about a half mile to a mile off the ground it turned a dark to bright green a couple hundred feet around it and then it was traveling towards the ground with a Long tail burning. Looked green and blue. Then it came down and got really low to the ground before It looked like it was going to hit. It may have burnt out but don't know. Just thought it was awesome so I looked it up on the news and no one reported it. My other friend was on the phone about 30miles south of me when I saw it, and he saw it to and asked me if I saw it too. Just thought it was cool so went to this website when I looked up meteors and it said I could report it here if I saw anything. So I figured I would see what you guys knew. Thanks - Mark Merriott
Thank you Mark for your fine report!

Fort Collins, Colorado - arrived from google.com on "Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News" by searching for green fireball 9/2/11.

Sun

Sun Unleashes Massive Solar Flares in One-Two Punch

Sunspot 1283
© NASA/SDO/GSFCThis image taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watching the sun shows a powerful solar flare (center right) just minutes after it erupted on 6:20 p.m. EDT (2220 GMT) on Sept. 6, 2011.

Just as many Americans got back to work after the long Labor Day weekend, the sun jolted to life as well, unleashing a massive solar flare just one day after another sun storm sent a stream of particles racing toward Earth.

The X-class solar flare - the most powerful type of sun storm - erupted at 6:12 p.m. EDT (2212 GMT) on Tuesday (Sept. 6) and hit its peak strength eight minutes later, according to a space weather update by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The flare occurred less than 24 hours after another less intense but still dramatic solar storm.

Several different satellites watched the action unfold, including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which constantly records high-definition videos of the sun in several different wavelengths.

The Tuesday event registered as an X2.1-class solar flare, while Monday's storm topped out at a still-powerful M5, NOAA officials said. Strong solar flares are classified according to a three-tiered system: X-class flares are the most powerful, M-class are of medium strength and C-class are the weakest.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Kenya's Rain of Meteorites

Kenya Meteorite
© Michael FarmerMeteorite hunter Michael Farmer poses with Rose Kamande, who found this 7.7-pound (3.5-kg) stone on July 17, 2011 — one day after meteorites fell from the sky in the villages surrounding Thika, Kenya.
Statistically, every year roughly 1,400 meteorites of pebble size and larger fall somewhere on Earth's lands. But few of these are ever found - and even fewer (about 3%) are actually seen as they arrive. Because they're rare, these witnessed falls are especially prized both by scientists (because the stones are fresh and unweathered) and by meteorite collectors (they command higher prices).

As it happens, a bunch of meteorites fell from the sky over east-central Africa on July 16th, and only now are details of this extraterrestrial special delivery coming to light.

On that morning, residents in villages near Thika, Kenya, heard a loud explosion but didn't know what to make of the strange stones that fell around them. Local police were called to investigate a sizable one that dropped into a cornfield and carted it off for further study.

This is a desperately poor region, and it didn't take long for local villagers to realize that these plain-looking rocks might be worth something. Word of the event soon reached meteorite hunters, and within hours the chase was on.

Meteor

Comet Elenin - the Final Prospect

Comet Elenin
© NASA
As many readers already know, Comet Elenin has begun the irreversible process of breaking up. We spoke earlier about the probablility of such an outcome, but I considered it less than 50%. On the graph at left you can see a selection of ten comets that approach the Sun closer than 0.5 a.u. The red line shows the boundary, to the left of which, derived from J. Bortle's formula, is the safe zone, but to the right is the zone of disintegration. The yellow color shows Comet Elenin, with absolute magnitude obtained by visual observations, and the blue is from JPL-NASA data. As we see, Bortle's formula, all-in-all, doesn't work too badly. Although there is a bright exception - the green triangle belongs to the unique comet 96P/Machholtz, about which I will speak next time.

Now it is absolutely clear that the comet's drop in brightness, first noted by Michael Mattiazzo on Aug. 20th, was not coincidental - the decay process had already begun, and over the course of the next several days the comet changed greatly. Its pseudo-nucleus became diffuse and extended, and later vanished completely. On images from Sept. 1st in the comet's coma there was no condensation visible, and that meant the comet had already broken up into fairly small pieces, with a maximum size of not more than a hundred meters.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Space Junk Rising Exponentially (and No, It's Not Man-Made)

Image
© Getty ImagesForget man-made space junk, the real threat is coming from further out in our solar system.
Scientists warn of 'tipping point' but shuttle's demise means there is no easy way to remove defunct satellites

The amount of junk in space is rising exponentially, with continuous collisions between abandoned equipment, spent rockets and other debris creating ever growing clouds of dangerous fragments, an influential report warned on Thursday.

The report, commissioned by NASA, says the quantity of hazardous material circling the Earth has reached a "tipping point" and poses a real and increasing danger to satellites and the International Space Station.

It suggests developing a clean-up strategy, which could include catching debris with nets, magnets or giant umbrellas.