BIG NEW SUNSPOT:


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A big new sunspot is rapidly emerging in the sun's northern hemisphere. Rogerio Marcon sends this picture taken just hours ago from his backyard observatory in Campinas, Brasil.

The active region is crackling with solar flares. The strongest so far is an M2-class eruption at 1900 UT on Feb. 6th. (See the movie from NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft.) Each of the spot's dark cores is about twice as wide as Earth, which makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. Stay tuned for solar activity!

RADIO-ACTIVE SUNSPOT: Behemoth sunspot 1045 is crackling with M-class solar flares--and that's not all. "There have been many loud shortwave radio bursts over the past two days," reports amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft of New Mexico. "Some of the bursts have completely saturated my receivers."


Sunspot 1045 appears poised to explosively accelerate more electrons in the days ahead as the flare-show continues. Ham radio operators, point your Yagis toward the sun!



NORTHERN LIGHTS: "As the solar wind swept over our planet tonight (Feb. 7th), the silent winter landscape with its heavy snow-clad trees made me feel that our place in the solar system must be among the most beautiful," says Fredrik Broms of Kvaløya, Norway. He used a Nikon D3 to record the otherworldly scene:




Arctic sky watchers should be alert for more auroras in the nights ahead. Sunspot 1045 hurled a CME toward Earth on Feb. 7th and it is due to arrive (along with an unrelated solar wind stream) on Feb. 9th to 10th. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of high-latitude geomagnetic actvity.

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