NASA Space Alerts

#MeteorSighting: Several witnesses reported sighting a fireball off the west coast of Florida on Nov. 8 at 10 p.m. ET. The event was confirmed by multiple publicly accessible cameras in the region, as well as by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper onboard the GOES-18 and GOES-19 satellites. The object - caused by a small, 2 foot fragment of an asteroid - was first spotted above a point in the Gulf due west of Islamorada. It traveled southwest at 54,500 mph before disintegrating above the ocean, northwest of Key West.

More on this fireball: go.nasa.gov/488qpV0

Supplemental data was provided by the American Meteor Society

It’s #SunDay! Here’s your space weather report for Oct. 30-Nov. 5:
•1 M-class flare
•0 C-class flares
•11 coronal mass ejections
•1 geomagnetic storm

This video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the week’s activity.

After a quiet stretch, the Sun woke up at the very end of this reporting period. Active region AR14566 rotated into view on the southeastern limb (lower left) around Nov. 3. Within about a day, its magnetic field had tangled into a complex arrangement that tends to produce strong flares.

On Nov. 5, AR14566 fired an M3.5 flare, the week’s strongest, along with a coronal mass ejection (not readily visible in this view) that sped away at about 2 million mph (915 km/s). The flare appears as a bright flash at about 2:59 in the video, to the left of and just below the Sun’s center. We’ll be watching this region as it crosses the Sun in the coming days.

More about solar storms and flares: go.nasa.gov/3Naeuv9

#MeteorSighting: Several witnesses reported sighting a fireball over southern Tennessee yesterday evening, Nov. 5, at 7:45 p.m. EST. The meteor was also detected by four NASA All Sky cameras in the region. The object – a small piece of an asteroid 2 inches in diameter, weighing 6 ounces – was first spotted 53 miles above Robbinsville, North Carolina, moving a little south of west at 47,000 mph. It disintegrated at an altitude of 25 miles above East Ridge, Tennessee, just southeast of Chattanooga.

More on this fireball: go.nasa.gov/4eEkSt1

It’s #SunDay! Here’s your space weather report for Oct. 23-29:
•0 M-class flares
•3 C-class flares
•25 coronal mass ejections
•0 geomagnetic storms

This video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the week’s activity.

It was a quiet week on the Sun, which makes it a good time to look back. This week marked 23 years since the Halloween Storms of 2003, when three giant sunspot groups unleashed some of the most powerful solar eruptions of the space age. On Oct. 28, 2003, one of them fired an X17 flare, still among the strongest ever recorded, and the geomagnetic storms that followed sparked auroras as far south as Texas and Florida. The 2003 storms happened before SDO launched (in 2010), but several other NASA spacecraft did capture imagery of the spectacular eruptions. Check out the archival video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: go.nasa.gov/4A0Rgho.

This year, the strongest flare of the week was a much more meager C2.8 on Oct. 26. It shows up as a small brightening just inside the western limb (right edge), below the Sun’s equator, at about 1:41 in the video. 🎃

More about solar activity: go.nasa.gov/3Naeuv9

It’s #SunDay! Here’s your space weather report for Oct. 16-22:
•2 M-class flares
•0 C-class flares
•24 coronal mass ejections
•0 geomagnetic storms

This video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the week’s activity.

Both of this week’s M-class flares came from active region AR14551. The first, an M1.3 on Oct. 16, appears as a small bright flash just below and to the right of the Sun’s center at about 0:17 in the video. The second, an M1.6 on Oct. 19, erupts at about 1:30, after the region had drifted about halfway to the western limb (right edge).

From about 2:00 to the end, watch AR14551 rotate off the Sun’s lower right edge, with glowing coronal loops towering above the limb. Quite a farewell! 🌅

At about 2:29, a calibration maneuver briefly moves the Sun out of frame.

More about flares and active regions: go.nasa.gov/3Naeuv9