Sunday, 7 October 2012

Draconid Meteor Shower And Incoming CME

This just arrived from Spaceweather.com:

DRACONID METEOR WATCH: Earth is about to pass through a stream of debris from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, source of the annual Draconid meteor shower.  Last year, Europeans witnessed a faint but furious outburst of 600 meteors per hour when the shower peaked.  No such display is expected this year, but the Draconids are notoriously unpredictable.  Northern-hemisphere sky watchers should be alert for slow-moving meteors emerging from the head of the constellation Draco the Dragon (not far from the North Star) on Sunday night, Oct 7th, through Monday morning Oct. 8th. Check http://spaceweather.com for more information and updates.

INCOMING CME:  A coronal mass ejection (CME) is heading for Earth.  The incoming cloud is expected to deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetosphere on October 8th, possibly sparking auroras at high latitudes.

EARTH-DIRECTED CME: Magnetic fields near sunspot AR1582 slowly erupted on Oct 5th sparking a B7-class solar flare and hurling a CME toward Earth. The Solar and Heliosphere Observatory (SOHO) captured this image of the expanding cloud:

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