Earth takes a regular beating

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Carbon60
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Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Carbon60 »

Hi all,

For the past three months there have been a couple of large coronal holes on the opposite faces of the Sun that have periodically blasted the Earth with high velocity solar wind as the Sun rotated to face them Earthward.

Not only did the resulting pulses of solar wind create beautiful aurora, they also disturbed Earth's magnetic field, creating geomagnetic storms detectable on my magnetometer based here in the UK.

I've plotted these periodic blasts to show their regularity, together with SDO images of the corresponding coronal holes. Who knows how long these will continue to be significant features? One thing is for sure, they make it easier to predict when the next storms are likely to occur.
20161221_Coronal Holes_3-Month.jpg
20161221_Coronal Holes_3-Month.jpg (241.3 KiB) Viewed 4535 times
Thanks for looking.

Stu.


H-alpha, WL and Ca II K imaging kit for various image scales.
Fluxgate Magnetometers (1s and 150s Cadence).
Radio meteor detector.
More images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarcarbon60/
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marktownley
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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by marktownley »

This is excellent data Stu! Some of my friends have gone to lapland for a couple of days and were reporting aurora from there. Does this / these coronal holes track back to being the same feature that caused the aurora I saw in august in Iceland?


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Montana »

Fantastic data set Stu :hamster: I went out to the cow field last night and took a few images but I don't think anything has come out on the pics, I need to have a closer look on the computer screen tonight.

Alexandra


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Carbon60 »

Hopefully you managed to capture something, Alexandra. It looked like a good night for it from my magnetometer- data to follow.

Mark, it looks like it was the same coronal hole when we spin back through the months. Here's some data going back six months together with SDO/AIA images which I've retrieved from SpaceWeather.com for dates going back in steps of approximately 28 days.
20161221_Coronal Holes_6-Month.jpg
20161221_Coronal Holes_6-Month.jpg (257.89 KiB) Viewed 4513 times
It looks like the hole might have first started sometime in July.

Stu.


H-alpha, WL and Ca II K imaging kit for various image scales.
Fluxgate Magnetometers (1s and 150s Cadence).
Radio meteor detector.
More images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarcarbon60/
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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by marktownley »

Fascinating data! Thanks Stu!


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Carbon60 »

Thanks Mark/Alexandra,

Here are the data specific to yesterday's geomagnetic storm.
20161221_Coronal Hole.jpg
20161221_Coronal Hole.jpg (131.37 KiB) Viewed 4499 times
It looks like the main pulse was a little early for us in the UK.

Stu.


H-alpha, WL and Ca II K imaging kit for various image scales.
Fluxgate Magnetometers (1s and 150s Cadence).
Radio meteor detector.
More images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarcarbon60/
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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by highfnum »

nice work
i had many things going on now, miss last one


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Montana »

Yes, I was out during the 9pm pulse and there is nothing on my pictures :(

Alexandra


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Montana »

A whole article on Spaceweather!!!!!!! well done :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: how fantastic Stu, wonderful work.

The hubby was just viewing and I thought I recognise that, stop, wait!
Alexandra


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by marktownley »

Congrats indeed! Here is the link to it for future reference http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?vie ... &year=2016


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Re: Earth takes a regular beating

Post by Carbon60 »

Many thanks, Alexandra/Mark.

It was a nice surprise the other day when Tony Phillips contacted me by email to ask for a bit of background information and said he was planning to run a feature, but it's thanks to you and others who also contribute to SolarChat including our dear departed friend Swiss Walter for all the encouragement over the years. These things take time and significant effort to grow and develop through multiple levels of refinement and it would be a pretty empty exercise without everyone's support, so thank you SolarChatters and Stephen, of course.

We now have 4 working magnetometers based on this design. Anyone else interested in making one can check out the tutorial in the reference library:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=20437


Stu.


H-alpha, WL and Ca II K imaging kit for various image scales.
Fluxgate Magnetometers (1s and 150s Cadence).
Radio meteor detector.
More images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarcarbon60/
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