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25 October 2011
Northern Lights Visible As Far South As Alabama Monday Night (Updated)
BREAKING NEWS! Saturday’s coronal mass ejection has sparked a moderate to strong geomagnetic storm and the aurora borealis is visible as far south as North Alabama tonight. Go outside and look for a red/greenish glow in the sky. The Kp index is at 7 and this indicates a major geomagnetic storm. Spaceweather.com has some pics already up on their site and more to come I suspect. The best view will …
4 October 2011
Well Deserved Nobel Prize Goes To Adam Riess
Last week I was chatting with my wife and somehow the mention of Nobel prizes came up. I offhandedly said the Nobel Prize in Physics will go to a guy named Adam Riess, but he will probably split it with two others. Fast forward to today and my wife Marian is painting the bedroom of our home here in Oklahoma City, and listening to BBC Radio 2. The 8 PM …
29 September 2011
The Hubble Time Machine
HubbleSite has a pretty amazing graphic up showing just how far back in time astronomers have looked using this amazing telescope and no other modern scientific instrument has captured the imagination of humans like Hubble. Eventually Hubble will burn up in the atmosphere, and that is a real shame since the most famous telescope (since Galileo made one) will be lost to history. To say that Hubble has revolutionized our …
26 September 2011
Major Solar Storm Underway
A major coronal mass ejection has occurred on the sun and while it will only glance Earth, it is big enough to have caused a major warning from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. This is called a G3 warning and that means it’s a biggy. From NOAA SWPC: A strong Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) has been observed and is partially-directed at Earth. The Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has issued …
8 September 2011
Sun Unleashes Second X-Class Flare in 24 Hours
The Solar Dynamic Observatory captured the flare at 2256 GMT, just over 24 hours after yesterday’s X 2.1 flare. The NOAA X-ray flux shows it as well and the indication is this will reach the X class level. The last two flare are already causing widespread radio disruptions. Here is an update from the NOAA SWPC: 2300Z, September 7, 2011 – Twenty four hours after unleashing an R3 (Strong) Solar …
7 September 2011
The Latest and Best Symphony of Science
If I try to show my wife even the most basic equation her eyes glaze over, but she loves this. So do I. For Americans, the long-haired dude is Brian Cox formerly of a British rock band who did the best two series on astronomy and cosmology since Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Cox is an Astrophysicist with CERN. They aired on the BBC in the past two years and you …
X-Class Flare on the Sun
We should hear more from the NASA solar physics folks tomorrow on how much of this was directed toward Earth, and what effects it will have.
1 September 2011
A Lonely Speck In The Great Enveloping Cosmic Dark
I know have posted it before but this demands a reprise for Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.