There’s a big sunspot on the surface of our nearest star right now. These are regions of intense magnetic activity, and can be the source of such explosive events as solar flares (eruptions of material off the surface when magnetic field lines get tangled up together and suddenly snap) and coronal mass ejections (huge eruptions of material from the Sun’s corona).
Well, Sunspot 930 does not disappoint. It had an eruption the other day, but it was pointed away from us. Today, however, it launched a volley right at us. There was a flare and then a CME, so several billion tons of plasma are headed toward us at a million miles per hour. Don’t be scared, though! Our atmosphere protects us. Furthermore, we get a cool auroral display when this happens, so if you live in northern regions (or southern like Africa, Australia, etc.) you may get an aurora soon. Some satellites may have issues, but the astronauts on the Shuttle and space station should be OK.
SpaceWeather.com has details. They also have this cool animated GIF showing the fast particles from the event slamming into the SOHO satellite and leaving a zillion little spots on the detector. I have info about the SOHO satellite and how this all works on my Planet X page.
Also, this spot is being discussed on the Bad Astronomy Universe Today bulletin board, with some nifty pictures being posted too.
December 13th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Indeed, this solar weather affects me directly – I am an amateur radio operator. 930 and 929 have made a mess of radio conditions since the 5th or so. There was a big radio blackout today on the HF bands.
If it wasn’t cloudy tonight, I’d probably be out photographing the aurora.
December 13th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
If anyone is interested, I plot most of my ham radio contacts in a kmz file for use with Google Earth. This is not super duper interesting, but it does show one neat little property of HF radio propagation: the skip zone.
Around my home location, there is a wide band where there are almost no contacts. This is because the RF leaves my antenna at a certain angle and bounces off the ionosphere, but that means there is an area where the RF is too high for people to receive. After it bounces it comes down for people to receive, and you can see it forms a relatively distinctive line.
I am in Ottawa, Ontario.
The file can be found at: http://www.squidzone.ca/ve3oij/files/QSO.kmz
December 13th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
I’m sad that it’s too cloudy to break out my little scopie and my solar filter. Hey Evolving, can you point me toward some good noob recourses for Ham Radio?
December 13th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
I came here from Nils blog No dependicies… Seems like you have a good bad astronomy blog here
He recommends us to vote for you, soo I have just done that now 
*good luck kick in your butt*
December 13th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Vote for the Bad Astronomer…
If you’re visiting this blog, you have time to vote for one the best science blog on the web, the Bad Astronomy Blog. Vote HERE. Vote Every Day.. And if you like some of the stuff posted on this blog……
December 13th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
Hey here in Southern-Eastern Australia (Victoria) we’ve got lots of horrendously huge bushfires (wildfires) burning out of control at the moment, meaning that lots of smoke is blowing around. This makes the sun look quite dim and a muted orange colour, leading to people taking pictures of it. A couple of people realised there was a sunspot in their photographs. See here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adonline/320739860/
December 13th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
I couldn’t help but bust out my calculator. If the CME is approaching at 620 km/s, and the sun is 8 light minutes away, it should take about 64 hours to reach us, assuming constant velocity. So don’t we have to wait two days for a magnetic storm?
December 13th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
How big is the sunspot in proportion to the Sun’s disc?
A couple of days ago I had the chance to look directly at the Sun, courtesy of thick smoke from a nearby bushfire. There were indistinct marks on the Sun, but I think they were actually small clouds, not sunspots.
However, in the past I have actually seen sunspots on the Sun. On that occasion, however, I was looking at the Sun through thick fog, and the sunspots were obvious as little black specks.
December 13th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
I sure hope we can get some nice aurorae from this outburst. I haven’t seen a major one since November of 2005. And during those two days I shot 11 rolls of film.
Of course, I need clear skies here too. I was hoping it would stay clear for the Geminids tonight, but it’s not happenning.
December 13th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
Albany NY checking in. Skies just cleared here. No aurora… but the Geminids are active. Catching some nice grazers over the last 30 minutes.
December 13th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
jbrader:
http://www.rac.ca can get you started. They have various links and information. Of course, if you’re American, the regulatory stuff will be different. For US-specific information you’d want to google on “ARRL”
December 13th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
A couple of the local news channels had zoomed-in shots of the sun through the thick smoke in their coverage of the bush fires here in Victoria. The sunspot was very prominent but neither channel made any mention of it.
The wind has picked up & changed direction so the smoke haze has cleared here in Melbourne. Some rain on the way but not enough to do much good unfortunately.
December 14th, 2006 at 5:32 am
Evolving Squid said:
“Indeed, this solar weather affects me directly – I am an amateur radio operator. 930 and 929 have made a mess of radio conditions since the 5th or so. There was a big radio blackout today on the HF bands.”
Yes, so get yourself up to 2 m where you might find an Es opening!
Plus, you must also be able to work Aurora from where you are with the extra deep ionisation from the X3 flare.
Nigel, G0TSR
December 14th, 2006 at 6:40 am
Ummm… Africa straddles the equator, dude. It’s only the extreme southern parts of Africa that you could consider “southern regions”. And much of Australia is in the tropics. Again, not exactly prime aurora territory…
December 14th, 2006 at 7:10 am
Nigel said:
Yes, so get yourself up to 2 m where you might find an Es opening!
Indeed, I should get an antenna up for 2m (rather than working satellites from my car).
I actually want to do some moonbounce, but I will need to suck up to relatives for space for the towers since my urban yard will not permit that sort of antenna array.
I haven’t heard any reports from people trying meteor scatter off the Geminids, although I’m sure some results will be bragged in the next few days.
For people not ham radio aware, the moon makes a wonderful communications satellite… Just point your antennas at it and use it like a giant reflector to talk to people on the whole moon-facing side of the world. You can do that with VHF and UHF radio, allowing you to span distances that would otherwise be pretty much impossible.
Meteor showers present the radio enthusiast to bounce radio signals off the ionized trails of meteors. Like a bad lover, you have to be quick to do that, but it is possible.
December 14th, 2006 at 7:36 am
I was up last night watching the Geminids. Saw a fair amount of them and they were pretty! So glad that it was clear. However, didn’t see Auroras, and I live far enough north to have a good chance to see them. In addition to meteors, also got to enjoy the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades through binoculars. As much as I love using the telescopes at the observatory where I work part-time, my own binoculars are great for the nebulae, planets, and moon!
Happy observing everyone!
Astrogirl
December 14th, 2006 at 8:26 am
[...] While reading Bad Astronomy yesterday (Have you voted today?) I ran into Phil’s Planet X SOHO page, which lead back to the main Planet X index which details the saga of Nancy Lieder and Mark Hazelwood’s arguments for the existence of a previously undiscovered planet they call ‘Planet X’. [...]
December 14th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Dunc, the equator practically splits Africa, and people from Australia, especially Tasmania and Southern Australia have posted pictures of aurora australis on BAUT. You can see this Google image search of aurora australis. Quite beautiful displays.
Here’s a page of aurora australis seen from the Cape of South Africa. (Since Phil has a page on this site about this, I’m sure he meant “southern Africa or Australia as he somewhat wrote):
http://www.saao.ac.za/public-info/pictures/aurora-australis/
December 14th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Here is a website that gives up to the minute auroral activity for the northern hemisphere. I keep it bookmarked, even though there is not too awful much activity in NW Ohio.
http://sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html
December 14th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Another interesting NOAA page about this: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2758.htm
December 15th, 2006 at 8:28 am
I’m perfectly well aware that southern Australia gets many auroral displays, and I expect that is what he meant. But, curmudgeon that I am, it winds me up to see people refer to entire continents when they mean to refer to only particular areas of those continents. It’s particularly bad with Africa, which many people seems to speak of as if it’s one country, and a not very large one at that.
Given the generally appalling level of geographic literacy in the USA (notice I did not say “the Americas”, or even “North America”), I kinda hoped that good folks like Phil would be more careful.
And don’t even think about saying “England” when you mean to refer to either the United Kingdom or the British Isles…
December 16th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Dunc, point taken about illiteracy regarding geography. I think in Phil’s case it was just rushed/lazy writing, but sure, it’s a world…er…continent of difference between say, Libya and South Africa.
Sheppard Software has some useful interactive geography games; my co-worker was struggling with the states of the US. :-/
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/Geography.htm
December 16th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
As many hams are somewhat techie nerd types and with that type comes the love of fiddling with all things electronic, ham radio has a big presence on the internet.
Some sites:
eHam.net
The Forums section is a huge set of discussions for the exchange of information. Elmers is a great spot for asking Noob questions. By the way, the US FCC is eliminating even the 5 wpm Morse Code requirement for high frequency licenses.
QRZ.com
ARRL
ARRL is the major US ham radio organization. It publishes materials such as the Handbook, licensing guides and other materials such as the QST magazine. Click “licensing” or “education” in the yellow header tabs. It has a list of local clubs, licensing classes and so on. If you put a location into the “licensing” “call signs” “lookup” search function all the licensed hams in the area will be listed.
73.