What's up in space? NANOSAIL-D FLASHES - INTENSIFYING SOLAR ACTIVITY
INTENSIFYING SOLAR ACTIVITY: A new sunspot is emerging over the sun's southeastern limb (image) and it is crackling with C-class solar flares, including a C2-flare at 1446 UT and a C6-flare at 1643 UT. So far none of the blasts has been geoeffective. The emergence of this new active region interrupts more than two weeks of relative quiet. Stay tuned.
NANOSAIL-D FLASHES: NASA's Nanosail-D, the first solar sail to orbit Earth, is flashing. On May 24th, Marco Langbroek watched a high pass over his home in Leiden, the Netherlands. "The sail was easily visible to the naked eye, rapidly flashing with peaks as bright as a first magnitude star," he reports. He photographed the flyby and plotted its variable brightness:
."At first, the flashes came at an irregular rate of 1 to 3 flashes per second, slowing down (and becoming more regular) to one flash each ~1.6s later," he says. The curious variations suggest that the sail is tumbling. Confirmation comes from other European observers such as Ralf Vandebergh, Russell Eberst, and Bram Dorreman, who have noticed similar flashes from the sail.
Amateur observations of Nanosail-D are of interest to NASA because the agency has never orbited a solar sail before. Everything it does is, by definition, new and interesting. Check the Simple Satellite Tracker or your cell phone for local flyby times--and enjoy the show!
VOLCANIC PLUME OVER NORTH AMERICA: The May 21st eruption of Iceland's Grimsvotn volcano sent a plume of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and today that plume is swirling over the high latitudes of North America. A 5-day movie from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) onboard Europe’s MetOp satellite shows the SO2 in motion:
This is not an especially dense or massive plume. Nevertheless, sky watchers in northern Canada and Alaska should be alert for rare colors and rays in the evening sky. Sulfur dioxide and associated aerosols can produce fantastic sunsets.
Provided by Space Weather News
