A Phoenix Aurora over Iceland
Feb 25, 2024
All of the other aurora watchers had gone home. By 3:30 am in Iceland, on a quiet September night, much of that night's auroras had died down. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a new burst of particles streamed down from space, lighting up the Earth's atmosphere once again. This time, surprisingly, pareidoliacally, the night lit up with an amazing shape reminiscent of a giant phoenix. With camera equipment at the ready, two quick sky images were taken, followed immediately by a third of the land. The mountain in the background is Helgafell, while the small foreground river is called Kaldá, both located about 30 kilometers north of Iceland's capital ReykjavĂk. Seasoned skywatchers will note that just above the mountain, toward the left, is the constellation of Orion, while the Pleiades star cluster is also visible just above the frame center. The 2016 aurora, which lasted only a minute and was soon gone forever would possibly be dismissed as a fanciful fable were it not captured in the featured, digitally-composed, image mosaic.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
ISS astronauts witness 'spectacular' auroras from space
Feb 25, 2024
Fresh aurora pictures from a NASA astronaut is making us green with envy.
Earlier this month, International Space Station astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli captured absolutely stunning pictures of a flag-like green aurora stretching from the southern regions of the Earth far up into space.
"The auroras from up here are spectacular," NASA's Moghbeli told Space.com during a Wednesday (Feb. 21) ISS press conference about science. Of the green auroras Moghbeli saw on Feb. 15, she said it was one of her space mission highlights witnessing "some green, some red that just swept across the surface of the Earth."
The ribbon-like aurora happen on Earth when our sun sends energetic particles towards Earth's upper atmosphere. Our planet's protective magnetic field in turn funnels the particles towards the poles, and the solar particles glow colorfully as they interact with our atmosphere.
The astronauts on board ISS right now are seeing particularly spectacular aurora because the sun is nearing its 11-year maximum of solar activity. More flares and coronal mass ejections of particles means more auroral activity on Earth, too.
"I love it," Moghbeli said, "because every time I look out the window, I'm in awe. Every time, it's a little different, even if we're passing over the same part of the Earth. Whether the lights are different, or the clouds or the seasons or the sun angles, every single time I'm amazed at how alive and beautiful our planet is."
https://www.space.com/iss-aurora-solar-maximum-astronaut-surprise
'A wonderful spectacle': Photographer snaps rare solar eruption as 'magnetic noose' strangles the sun's south pole
Feb 25, 2024
A gigantic plume of plasma recently exploded from the sun's south pole, where solar eruptions almost never occur. The explosion, which a photographer captured in stunning detail, is another telltale sign that the sun is about to enter its most active phase — the solar maximum.
The rare phenomenon occurred on Feb. 17, when a solar flare exploded from a sunspot near the sun's south pole, releasing a gigantic column of ionized gas, or plasma, that towered around 124,300 miles (200,000 kilometers) above the solar surface — around 15 times taller than Earth, Spaceweather.com reported. The plasma eventually snapped away from the sun and hurtled into space as a gigantic cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).
Astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau captured a highly detailed composite image of the plume before it broke away from the solar surface. "The plasma column was so large, I had to rotate the camera to fit it into the frame," Poupeau told Spaceweather.com. "It was truly a wonderful spectacle."
This stellar blast was extremely unusual because it erupted from the sun's south pole: Most solar flares erupt from sunspots on or around the sun's equator and almost never from near the magnetic poles, because the poles are where the sun's magnetic field is strongest, which normally suppresses sunspot formation.
Due to the orientation of the flare, the CME was directed away from Earth and the rest of the planets, which all orbit the sun on the same plane.
The unusual eruption was likely triggered by what scientists call a polar crown filament (PCF) — a loop of magnetism that circles the sun's magnetic poles, according to Spaceweather.com. The plasma plume that was spat out by the flare is known as a polar crown prominence (PCP).
PCPs become more common during the solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle. During this phase, PCFs shrink in size, "like a tightening noose around their respective poles," Spaceweather.com reported. As these magnetic crowns constrict, they "strangle" the nearby magnetic fields, making them more likely to explode.
Experts believe the solar maximum will arrive at some point in the next few months — earlier than originally predicted.
As we approach solar maximum, more and more weird phenomena are occurring at the sun's poles: In February 2023, a PCP broke off from the sun and got caught in a PCF, creating a swirling plasma vortex that raged around the sun's north pole for eight hours. And in March last year, a PCP collapsed in on itself, creating a gigantic plasma waterfall near the sun's south pole, which was shortly followed by an enormous plume of rotating plasma, known as a "solar tornado," near the solar north pole that lasted for three days.
https://www.space.com/sun-rare-solar-eruption-magnetic-noose
RFK Jr.: Who Let Fauci Run The Show?
Dr. Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted he was wrong about many of the things he proclaimed during the pandemic. When I posted scientific evidence and warnings about how Dr. Fauci was misleading the public during that time, government officials and the media branded me as a conspiracy theorist, deplatforming and heavily censoring me both in the mainstream and on social media. Meanwhile, Trump and then Biden and their political parties handed the keys of our nation over to Dr. Fauci.
The next time there’s a pandemic or the going gets rough, who do you want to have in power? We The People, or the two political parties that got almost everything wrong?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGK6pc6uRjQ