C6.2 X Ray Flare 10/07/2013 06:15UTC

Earth facing C6.2 X-ray solar flare erupted from region 1856. 10/07/2013 at about 04:15!the C stands for Common although above C5 is not so common lately.

New Frontier Reached!

NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey into Interstellar Space 

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun. New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science. "Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are." Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004.

NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission

NASA Discusses Asteroid Initiative Progress at AIAA's Space 2013

August 2013 Solar Wind & Space Weather From STEREO Ahead & Behind HI1

Looking back at August, 2013 From this big picture view of HI1 you can see solar wind makes it all the way to earth. That other planet that glides by in the beginning is Mercury.

Solar Activity 2013-09-05

Solar activity 20130904

Comparing Helioviewer to JHelioviewer

Comparing Helioviewer to JHelioviewer

We tried racing to see whether Helioviewer or Jhelioviewer is better.

They each have their pros and cons. Helioviewer is faster by far! Usually the problem with delay is if it's some great event it gets back logged. Jhelioviewer is much faster to get a motion glimpse of the scene but it takes some time to export the video and then you have to upload it to YouTube (or other video service) and fill in the description and tags etc and wait again. The helioviewer upload to YT option is click it and forget it. You can even give it a nice name.

You might still want to add some more tags but it's efficient. If you are going to edit several clips together. In Movie Maker or another software editing program and add music it is always better than YT editor because the YT music is non-commercial. You do have to make sure you have your licenses for the Music.

The real differences are in the quality.

Above is a quick little video from Helioviewer with parameters 3 hours and time selected as 30 sec.

Fox News Hype

What was Fox News talking about? 

In this report Fox New reports: YIKES! Chunk of Sun Headed Toward Earth at 2 Million Miles an Hour http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/07/30/chunk-sun-headed-toward-earth-2-million-miles-hour

Latest unaltered images from SDO and NOAA We can see that different filters record different information. The dark areas on the green one from NOAA reveals less X-rays and the bright are more. These X-rays are the same as when you go to the doctors. See also in the side panel to the right The Sun Now latest images.

The Pink (211) filter above is the closest current image to the one below since I wanted to show the most recent image the most recent image from SOHO is several days ago. It is notoriously late

Earth Facing Coronal Hole

We have a very large coronal hole that is directly in an earth facing position. This same coronal hole has rotated around the sun for 3 rotations it has reduced significantly since that last 2 rotations but there is still a likelihood of a solar storm in 2 to 3 days time. This rotation may also have less impact due to the configuration of the magnetic field of the surrounding area.

Full Disc Coronal hole is in the center

A coronal hole is an area where the magnetic lines are open. The open fields allow the material to be

Double Peaked Long duration C3.1 X-ray flare

Long duration C3.1 X-ray flare, This one was actually double peaked and although the official location was 11800 There is a high level of confidence it flared significantly in region 11793 for the first peak and a longer and brighter flare from region 11800. There is a CME associated with this flare although it appears to be going mostly to the left of the planet. 

CME

Thank you and How to get page notifications on Facebook

Thank You Sun Whisperers Community

We started our Sun Whisperers Facebook page just a few short months ago and already we are up to 700 likes and it's all organic! I first would like to take a moment to say thank you to all the people who have liked the page. So many great comments and posts, likes and shares. Love you! Even if you just enjoy the posts in your news feed, I feel your love.  But just in case you happen to have missed a few of the posts here is a little instruction on how to make sure you never miss a page post again! This is especially useful if you are effected directly by space weather like a lot of people are through their career, lifestyle or sensitivity.

How To get Page Notifications on Facebook 

In order to make sure you receive a notification for a Facebook Page, after you have liked a page, hover your pointer over the like button and a drop down menu will open. Click √ Get Notifications, √ Show in News Feed and √ Add to Interests Lists once you check Add to Interests Lists another drop down menu will appear and you can select an interest list you have already created or create a new list. Interest Lists will show up on the left margin on your Facebook News feed.

Filament vs Prominence

Filament vs Prominence. A filament is a long cord like structures that sometimes release in beautiful displays and sometimes they don't. When it's on the edge so that is stands out against the black
background it is called a prominence. When it is further in and harder to make out it is a filament. We have two great arcing prominences releasing right now.

 

Solar Dragon

Solar Dragon

Was looking like it was going to be a completely quiet day so was looking at the progression of the sunspots. Then I noticed this amazing filament eruption over the course of many hours.

Solar Dragon

Flares and Filaments of the 17th and 18th (07-17-2013-07-18-2013)

The beginning of surprises on the eastern limb started out with quiet filament eruption on the 17th,

and one of the south west

about 24 hours later we see a repeat performance only this time with 2 C2.3 flares one right after the

C2.1 X-ray Fare

An impulsive C2.1 X-ray flare erupted from active region 11793. This is an earth facing location.

 

C2.1 X-ray Flare.

What is a flare anyway? A flare is a sudden brightening of the sun's surface. It effects the sun in all the levels and in all of the electromagnetic frequencies including the X-rays.

The chart overlaid on the image to the left is from NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center  which has a very sensitive satellite that records X-rays and relays data to earth. The Levels are Categorized by intensity A, B, C for Common, M for Moderate and X for Extreme. Within each  level there are 9.9 smaller levels So Each flare receives a letter and number designation. Each level is 10 times stronger than the one before, on a logarithmic progression.

The Purple inset image is an optical X-ray

Learning about the Sun Start here>

Not Quite Quiet Sun

Nice and quite solar activity it is allowing me time to learn all the new details involved in setting up and creating a site to share all about the sun and solar activity. As with everything there is a learning curve involved. I was just telling my friend yesterday how many fun and exciting things there are to learn about in solar activity and space weather. I realized that lots of people are becoming more interested everyday and I thought it might be nice to share what I have managed to teach myself and what I am learning as I go. So lets start with this great video that I take no credit for.

What is a "quiet" Sun?

Of course quiet is a relative term during solar maximum as we are. Quiet is still quite active. Take for example this image of SDO's composite image of filters 171,193 and 211 ( will explain the filters later)

What to look for on the SDO images. 

There are many features that we look at that help us determine the space weather and also to

Tracking Solar Events 07-16-2013

Tracking Solar Events 07-16-2013

We started off with a C flare (video) that produced a CME (Photos).

Then there was a CME..

Solar Activity

After a somewhat active day with many C level flares the sun