Rare sights in the sky

[Artfldgr]

hard to see such things in nyc... too many city lights..
out in Ky and other places its better... and even better (according to my son) way out in the pacific..
last time i was able, i did confirm the milky way was still there and you can see it..

[SwordfishMining]

Well that was a real disappointment. You didn't miss anything unless they all went by when i was not looking for a minute. I saw 5 or 6 I think in the hours they said was the window and it was not overcast. I think whoever was writing the article left out the fact they are spreading out over the century and not a tight little group and would be expected to decrease over time. Sounds like Beruit around here with people practicing for the Turkey shoot this week end. Reminds me I was donating a opal pendant to the silent auction i need to polish up and get a chain on.

[PinkDiamond]

LOL, you'd better hop to it, this is Friday.

We had rain and have been covered in clouds for 3 days now.

[Artfldgr]

the perseids is a better shower..

[PinkDiamond]

From Spaceweather.com, we may not have been able to see even one, but check this out. I saved the composite image to my computer so I could upload it here, without it disappearing when the article moves. This is wild, and in the video it looks kind of boring and slow almost all the way through the two+ minute clip, though interesting just the same, but near the end there's a sudden burst of meteors one right after the other going by the camera so fast they look like machine gun fire. Way cool!

STARLINK SATELLITES PHOTOBOMB A METEOR SHOWER: Yes, there was an outburst of alpha Monocerotid meteors on Nov. 22nd. As predicted by forecasters Esko Lyytinen and Peter Jenniskens (NASA/Ames), Earth grazed a filament of comet dust, prompting a modest flurry of meteors to emerge from the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn). In La Palma on the Canary islands, a Global Meteor Network camera captured the display--and something more. Starlink photobombed the meteor shower:

Video credit: Denis Vida, University of Western Ontario

Dozens of Starlink satellites flew through the camera's field of view, putting on a display that rivaled the meteor shower itself. The score: alpha Monocerotids 90, Starlink 50. And the Starlink satellites were much brighter.

"It was a real eye-opener," remarked Bill Cooke, the lead of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, when he saw the video. "This kind of thing could force us to change how we write software to auto-detect meteors."

Starlink is a venture by SpaceX. The idea is to launch 12,000 or more satellites into Earth orbit, surrounding our planet and providing global internet coverage even to people in remote areas. The first batch of 60 Starlink satellites launched in May 2019 surprised astronomers and prompted the International Astronomical Union to issue a statement of concern. Filling the sky with artificial stars might not be good for astronomy, they suggested.

https://spaceweather.com/

[SwordfishMining]

With further research online it was clearly stated at the beginning, for east coast only that the other people sharing it failed to include.

[Artfldgr]

it was cloudy in ny... but even without that, only the brightest would have been seen..
the perseids are easier to see (usually)...
and the Geminid shower is coming up in December

The famous Geminid meteor shower will sling bright shooting stars this winter, though a just-past-full moon will make all but the brightest hard to see. The shower will peak on Dec. 13-14, according to NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke. Even after the peak, bright meteors may be visible for the next few days.

The Geminids are considered one of the best meteor showers every year because the individual meteors are bright, and they come fast and furious. This year, because of the moonlight, around 20-30 may be visible per hour.

"It won't be a total washout, because the Geminids have a lot of fireballs in them," Cooke said, which may be visible despite the moon. The best time to watch for the Geminids is about 2 a.m. in your local time zone.

the first recorded observation was in 1833 from a riverboat on the Mississippi River — and is still going strong. In fact, it's growing stronger. That's because Jupiter's gravity has tugged the stream of particles from the shower's source, the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, closer to Earth over the centuries.

The meteors tend to peak about 2 a.m. your local time wherever you're observing from, but can be seen as early as 9-10 p.m.

The Geminids, as their name implies, appear to emanate from the bright constellation Gemini (the twins). To find Gemini in the Northern Hemisphere, look in the southwestern sky for the constellation Orion, which is easy to spot by the three stars in the hunter's "belt." Then look just up and to the left of Orion to see Gemini, high in the southwestern sky. In the Southern Hemisphere, Gemini appears to the lower right of Orion and both will hang in the northwestern sky.

Although the meteors will appear to stream away from Gemini, they can appear all across the sky. For best results, you should look slightly away from Gemini so that you can see meteors with longer "tails" as they streak by; staring directly at Gemini will just show you meteors that don't travel very far.

[SwordfishMining]

Nice viewing tips Art, Thanks.

[PinkDiamond]

Wow, check these out. I watch aurora cam, but have never seen any like these.

A New Form of Auroras: “The Dunes”
January 29, 2020 / Dr.Tony Phillips

"Jan. 29, 2020: A new type of aurora is rippling across Arctic skies. Citizen scientists who discovered it nicknamed it “The Dunes” because of its resemblance to desert sand dunes. A paper published in the Jan. 28th issue of AGU Advances describes the new form and the unexpected physics that causes it.


Above: Aurora dunes over Laitila, Finland, on Oct. 7, 2018. Credit: Pirjo Koski. [more]

Dune-shaped auroras form in a narrow altitude range 80 km to 120 km above Earth’s surface. Turns out, this is an extremely hard-to-study layer of Earth’s atmosphere. It’s too high for weather balloons, and too low for rockets.

“Due to the difficulties in measuring atmospheric phenomena between 80 and 120 km, we sometimes call this region ‘the ignorosphere‘,” says Minna Palmroth, Professor of Computational Space Physics at the University of Helsinki and the lead author of the study.

Sky watchers in the Arctic have been seeing Dunes for years without understanding what they were. A breakthrough came on Oct. 7, 2018, when multiple groups photographed the dunes from widely separated locations in Finland. Maxime Grandin, a postdoctoral researcher in Palmroth’s team, analyzed the images, using triangulation techniques to decipher the Dune’s geometry.

Conclusion: Dunes are located ~100 km high–smack-dab in the middle of the ignorosphere–and have a pure, monochromatic wavelength of about 45 km.


Above: An artists’ concept of a mesospheric bore trapped in a high-altitude waveguide. [more]
The research team believes the Dunes are a “mesospheric bore”–a type of atmospheric gravity wave that springs up from the surface below and gets caught in a thermal waveguide ~100 km high. When solar wind particles rain down on the bore, they illuminate its rippling structure.

The discovery of Dunes may allow researchers to study the ignorosphere as never before. ... "
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2020/01 ... the-dunes/


While I'm here I"ll give you links to two aurora cams. Happy viewing for any who use them.

Canadian aurora cam:
https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outl ... reserved=0

European aurora cam. John found this one for me.
https://virmalised.ee/aurora-live-cameras/

[SwordfishMining]

Ignorosphere made me go look LOL. We'll be seeing a lot more phenomenon exerting itself as the magnetic field decreases on the earth and the sun gets more energetic. It's amazing how much you can observe with the modern instruments and internet. Total distraction possible.