What is space weather?

Great Space Weather Website-Solar Cycle 24.com

Current Space Weather Reports

NASA SOHO Solar Image Gallery

Brilliant Noise-Brilliant Noise takes the viewer into the data vaults of solar astronomy. Check out the         20 Hz link at the end of the video.

20 Hz Takes you to the edge of perception and to the doorstep of the 5th dimension via 20 Hz radio astronomy.

Black Rain Black Rain is an amazing short film by Semiconductor that is a collection of raw images from the NASA STEREO Mission, as is another extraordinary Semiconductor film-Brilliant Noise. ENJOY!!! 

NASA Video Explaining Power Outage

Expect Gridlock Along Road to Renewable Energy

We need to inspire more students to study space-weather so that we can understand the effects of solar activity on our world. Solar flares, which peak in 11 year cycles, knock out electric power grids and global positioning satellites. The next peak in the solar cycle is predicted to happen during the 2012-2013 time period, and major solar flares are known to occur for several years after the peak. Scientists are also studying the relationship of solar activity to catastrophic weather patterns, so solar activity and space weather are a major concern for modern man.

Remarkable solar Activity 11/14/11 Solar forums all over the world are buzzing with Sun-astronomers proclaiming this to be the biggest prominence that many of them had ever witnessed," he says. Read more...

Photo Stephen Ramsden

MAGNIFICENT SUNSPOT: 11/03/11 One of the largest sunspots in years is rotating over the sun's northeastern limb. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture of AR1339 during the early hours of Nov. 3rd: 

Measuring some 40,000 km wide and at least twice that in length, the sprawling sunspot group is an easy target for backyard solar telescopes Two or three of the sunspot's dark cores are wider than Earth itself.                  NASA Image

Auroras from Space September 21,

2011 Solar activity is picking up, and no one has a better view of its effect on Earth than the crew of the International Space Station. During a geomagnetic storm on Sept. 17th, astronauts recorded a must-see movie of auroras dancing underfoot:  Read more

NASA Image

 Getting ready for the next big solar storm             

June 21, 2011: In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren't sure how to categorize it.  The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii...read more

Photo credit: Martin Stojanovski

AURORAS INVADE THE USA!!! 3/11/11 Earth's magnetic field is still reverberating from a CME strike on March 10th. During the past 24 hours, Northern Lights have descended as far south as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan in the United States. "At one point the lights filled more than half of the entire sky," says Travis Novitsky, who sends this self-portrait from Grand Portage, MN:

nasa inages

Huge Solar Flare Jams Radio Signals-NASA

February 17, 2011  A huge solar flare is reminding us earthlings just how  
vital our connection with the sun is, and how space weather will play an 
increasingly important role in our daily lives. The Society of Amateur 
Radio Astronomers has been all over this recent activity, so feel free to
sign up with SARA and get the latest insider space weather information.  
It might be time to get the 10 meter ham radio gear out of storage!

73's Jim N1MAA 

WASHINGTON  A powerful solar eruption that triggered a huge geomagnetic 
storm has disturbed radio communications and could disrupt electrical 
power grids, radio and satellite communication in the next days, NASA said...

Global Eruption Rocks the Sun

Dec. 13, 2010:  On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.            

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."...

Solar Tornado 10/28/10                                                                                                                        NASA Image 

SUN TWISTER: Earlier today, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded a spectacular eruption on the sun's northeastern limb. An unstable magnetic filament hundreds of thousands of kilometers long pirouetted and launched a fragment of itself into space. Earth was not in the line of fire, but the SDO movie is worth seeing anyway.

NASA Image

NASA Issues Updated Power Grid Risk Statement 10/26/10                                                                                                         

Since the beginning of the Space Age the total length of high-voltage power lines crisscrossing North America has increased nearly 10 fold. This has turned power grids into giant antennas for geomagnetically induced currents. With demand for power growing even faster than the grids themselves, modern networks are sprawling, interconnected, and stressed to the limit