weather Archives - The Sun Today with Dr. C. Alex Young

April 24, 2012

Purple Pillars and Green Auroral Glow over the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland captured by Martin McKenna and shared through spaceweather.com

Aurora over Giant’s Causeway and Ballintoy Harbour, Co. Antrim

Gorgeous aurora captured by Martin McKenna! Last night’s geomagnetic storm (April 24, 2012) put on quite a show and this was not even a large event. This is near the childhood homes of some of our esteemed Irish solar physics colleagues!

April 22, 2012

A Prominence Eruption Sends a CME to Mercury

On April 22, 2012, filament material uncurled as an erupting prominence around sunspot group AR11463. There was a C1.8 solar flare and the resulting eruption produced a SCORE-C CME detected by SOHO/LASCO C2 at 15:30 UT.

April 17, 2012

April162012-M1.7andEruption-nocaptions.001

Beautiful Eruptions from the East Limb of the Sun

An eruption of plasma from just behind the solar limb observed by SDO with the 304 Angstrom camera.This shows material at temperatures around 60,000-80,000 Kelvin. This produced a CME that went out the left side (East) of the Sun starting around 2 UT. At ~1000 km/s the CME has a SCORE O (for ordinary). NASA produced a computer model predicting the CME will impact STEREO Behind on 4/17 at 7:40 UT (but not Earth).