Archive for the ‘Relinking’ Category

Aurora viewing from Seattle, basic info, tips, locations and resources.
Summary: ALWAYS LOOK NORTH, and expect it to be dim.

Cloudcover prediction for tonight at 11pm:

This image should have today’s date on it. If it does not, click on the image and choose “Sky Cover, 11pm” from the table on the left.

Cloudcover information from NOAA

Viewline prediction for tonight:

These should have today and tomorrow’s dates on them. If they don’t, click on them to see the latest forecast. This tool is experimental, so even if you’re outside the “viewline” you may be able to see things though they’ll be closer to the horizon. This is just a prediction. Viewline from NOAA

Basics:

What: Possible aurora types: Slight greenish tinge, perhaps brighter columns or curtains in the sky, or a diffuse red glow. Do not be tricked by the normal red/yellow glow from downtown Seattle.

When: Use dateful.com/time-zone-converter to convert aurora prediction times from UTC to Pacific Daylight or Standard Time.

• It is currently: in Seattle time.
• It is currently: in UTC (what the predictions use).

Where: Always look North for aurorae. When clouds are predicted over Puget Sound, so I recommend viewing from Lake Kachess just past Snoqualmie Pass, or even further East. There may also be chances from Sequim or north of Everett.

How: A digital camera with a long exposure will be better at detecting the slightest glow than your eye, but once it gets bright enough you won’t need the camera anymore.

Tips:

• Alice’s Aurora Tip #1: Be patient, keep an eye on the data (see links below) until you see something. Then turn off the data and enjoy.
• Alice’s Aurora Tip #2: Look North (usually, unless the Kp number is very large, then 🤷🏼‍♀️). Be in a dark place.
• Alice’s Aurora Tip #3: Bring a digital camera or phone with a long-exposure setting. Long-exposure images gather more light than your eye with long exposures you may see the aurora first in a viewfinder or in an image, and with your eye as it brightens.
• Alice’s Aurora Tip #4: It is usually hard to see from Seattle, even when visible. Give your eyes a chance to adapt. Enjoy the stars too.

Forecasts for minute-to-minute updates:

The Ovation Model – a prediction: bright green, yellow or red overlapping Seattle means go outside and look.

Soft Serve News – a prediction: Kp over 5 means possible aurora for Seattle, but the higher the better. If it hits 6 go outside. 7 I go somewhere local. 8 I go somewhere dark and farther away. 9 I turn my life upside down and you should too.

Space Weather Live – reporting on current conditions

Nowcast Hp30 Index – Because officially Kp is a 3-hour average I also check the “Hp30” for a similar but faster-reported index (every 30 minutes). Use the same Kp number thresholds as above with this index.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center – LOTS of info in one place.

Current Activity, Estimated Kp,  – a measurement: Kp over 5 is good news. Remember the date/time along the bottom are in Universal Time so subtract 7 or 8 hours depending on daylight savings.

More:

Space Weather Woman has detailed videos that she posts often.

Advanced Solar Wind Charge/Direction – a measurement: scroll down. On the left under “Real Time Solar Wind” is a little speedometer thing labeled “Bz.” When this is pointed towards S/-50/Red we have better auroras in the Northern Hemisphere. When it is pointed the other way, the Southern Hemisphere has better aurora.

When Kp levels surpass 5 it is worth starting to check in. In Seattle, we hope for Kp levels of 6 or greater for the best chance to see the aurora. I explained Kp over here.

Current Kp:

This should have dates within 24+ hours of now. If it does not, click through.

Recommended Viewing Locations:

My general stargazing location recommendations.

See the tab above that says “Seattle Stargazing“? That’s my most recent list of ideas for you.

The map can be found over on Google Maps as well.

My Perseids news coverage 2015

-Full article at West Seattle Blog.

-Interview on KUOW’s The Record for 8/12/2015.

-365 Days of Astronomy What’s Up Tonight, Southern Skies Edition August 2015 (includes tips on astrophotography)

–Alan Boyle’s article at GeekWire about Seattle stargazing spots

~ A l i c e !

Here’s a recording of my interview yesterday with Tom Huytler of KOMO Newsradio. It’s quite short as usual, and it was also quite fun!

Link to download recording. (.mp3 3.2M)

As always I have plenty of respect for the anchors and reporters over at KOMO. Ever since my first interview there with Kathi Goertzen so many years ago, I have never been treated so well or with so much respect as an interviewee as by all the folks at KOMO. Tom, Jane, Rick (and Kathi, when she was around) always give me space to say what I think is important on a topic, and don’t pressure me to give the answer “they” think would be most interesting or incendiary to the audience. I know that sounds like just plain good journalism practice when interviewing folks, but I’ve had other experiences too and you’ve seen other styles of interviewing in this (hopefully declining) age of reality television.

Thanks for listening!

-Alice

Head on over to 365 Days of Astronomy to hear my short podcast today about the defintion of the edge of the Solar System.

~ A l i c e !

My latest post is over at West Seattle Blog! It’s a nice run down of the year.

~ A l i c e !

Sure seems like we’ve had more than our fair share of bollides this weekend (Russia, Cuba, and San Francisco to name a few). Guess what? I THOUGHT SO TOO. But I was also skeptical. So I asked the scientists I trust* and scientists who specialize in this. They said that we ARE NOT experiencing an apocalypse or really even an increase.

1. Please go read my blogfather, Phil Plait’s, article about this.

The rest of my article is mostly in addition to what he’s already said.

The Frequency Illusion

In popular parlance this is also called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, but the sources on that name are a bit questionable, so I’ll call it the Frequency Illusion.

You know how when you learn a new word, like “brobdingnagian,” suddenly you begin to see that word everywhere? (Perhaps brobdingnagian is a poor choice, it’s just the newest word I’ve learned.) How about The Great Gatsby? I haven’t thought about The Great Gatsby in years and suddenly there’s a new DiCaprio movie coming out and it was jut mentioned in the novel I’m reading. For my husband this week it’s the word “Trypophobia.”

Anyway, that’s the Frequency Illusion. Your mind is keyed into something, and you notice it everywhere. We’ve been hyperaware of asteroids and meteors this weekend, so more people are noticing and reporting the ones that normally occur. The media too is taking special note which is helping us notice these seemingly-extra occurrences.

Coincidence?!

Yes.

The asteroid 2012 DA14 and the spectacular and devastating bollide over Russia are a coincidence. Literally a cosmic coincidence. They are unrelated.

The bollides since then have been a normal part of our everyday lives here on Earth, you just haven’t been noticing them regularly.

Bollides are Normal?

“Alice, I don’t believe you. Are you saying the bollide over Russia was normal? I don’t think hundreds of people are normally injured in sonic booms from meteors in our atmosphere.”

You’re right about that. Fireballs/Bollides/Meteors as large and powerful as the one over Chelyabinsk tend to happen once every 100-ish years. That doesn’t mean there won’t be one tomorrow, or in 50 years. On average they happen once every 100 years.

Fireballs tend to happen for objects about the size of a basketball, and those hit the Earth about once a day. Again, you can easily have two or ten in one day, as well as several days without one, but on average they happen once a day. This is what the meteors over Cuba and San Francisco were: normal daily bollides.

P.S.

Fund the search for near earth objects.

Vocabulary

I see how you might be confused. I’ve used several words interchangeably, and those that I haven’t are minutely different than each other.

• Comet — an ice and rock body in space.
• Asteroid — a smallish rocky body in space. Smaller than a planet or a Moon, larger than a house usually.
• Meteoroid — a tiny rocky object in space, usually sand-sized but up to the size of a house.
• Meteor — when a meteoroid impacts the Earth’s atmosphere it incinerates. We see them and know them as shooting stars.
• Meteorite — when a piece of a meteor survives the Earth’s atmosphere and impacts the Earth’s surface.
• Bollide — an especially bright or exploding meteor. (This is the astronomy definition, the geology definition is different, but doesn’t apply here)
• Fireball — an especially bright or exploding meteor. (Mm-hmm, pretty much the same as a bollide.)

Want More?

I got my statistics from Yeoman’s Top  Ten on NASA JPL’s Asteroid Watch.

Of course, Phil’s “The Sky is Falling… or is it?” article is also great.

Vocabulary reference from NASA’s Near Earth Object program.

~ A l i c e !

*”Hey Alice, Phil just posted something a day or two ago that he later admitted was wrong. Why do you trust him?” That’s why. Scientists admit when they’re wrong and change their views as the evidence changes. This is harder to do than you might think, so keep practicing. I keep practicing too.

Quick link for you, KOMO’s Tom Hutyler and Jane Shannon interviewed me about the asteroid 2012 DA14 (close pass by the Earth on February 15 — no danger).

Hear it here: http://www.komonews.com/radio/home/featured/190111451.html

~ A l i c e !

I had to do it. I’m collecting memes about Curiosity’s landing on Mars. I’ll do my best to keep up, but I will probably fail soon, due to the viral and meme-y nature of the internet.

A joke made by many.

The Flight Director.

He’s his own meme now too.

http://whatstrending.com/2012/08/meet-mohawk-guy-nasa-mars-curiosity-livestream/

xkcd.
Not really a meme, but worth including.

Curiosity killed the cat.

 http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qdanz/

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qd993/

This post is a job for tumblr. Too bad I don’t have a tumblr account.

Funny, too many to post: http://www.quickmeme.com/Unimpressed-Curiosity/?upcoming

Here’s one:

 http://blog.makezine.com/2012/08/05/sometimes-we-live-in-the-future/

From Boing Boing:

Maaaaaars?

MARS!

Marsmarsmarsmarsmarsmarsmarsmars …

Kate Davis via Boing Boing.

You know how I said I was going to give up? Well, now it is time to give it up. I can’t keep up. :) It was fun anyway.

Don’t miss this week’s Carnival of Space over at We Are All in the Gutter Looking at the Stars. They were thoughtful enough to include me, so definitely go see what everyone else has been up to!

~ A l i c e !

I just got this in my e-mail. I can’t tell if this is a new “Comet McNaught” or a new approach by the same one we saw a couple years ago. This is a different comet than the “Comet McNaught” discovered a few years ago, but it was discovered by the same person! In any case – enjoy!

Space Weather News for June 8, 2010
http://spaceweather.com

NEW COMET McNAUGHT: A fresh comet is swinging through the inner solar system, and it is brightening rapidly as it approaches Earth for a 100 million mile close encounter in mid-June. Comet McNaught (C/2009 R1) has a vivid green head and a long wispy tail that look great through small telescopes. By the end of the month it could be visible to the naked eye perhaps as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper. Because this is the comet’s first visit to the inner solar system, predictions of future brightness are necessarily uncertain; amateur astronomers should be alert for the unexpected. Visit http://spaceweather.com for sky maps, photos and more information.

You are subscribed to the Space Weather mailing list, a free service of Spaceweather.com.

New subscribers may sign up for free space weather alerts at http://spaceweather.com/services/ .

~ A l i c e !