Geomagnetic Storm In Progress

shogun writes "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports a strong geomagnetic storm is in progress. The shuttle, ISS and GPS systems may be affected." They think this storm was caused by a weak solar flare on April 3rd. As you may expect, this has caused some unusually impressive northern lights since it started. What you may not expect is a photograph from Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station showing the aurora from orbit. He apparently tweets a lot of pictures from space. He and his crewmates have taken over 100,000 pictures since coming aboard the ISS.

Geomagnetic data on the storm

[dtmos]

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center [noaa.gov] has a bunch of data on the storm, including the estimated 3-hour Planetary Kp-index [noaa.gov], and a bunch of other data [noaa.gov] and alerts [noaa.gov].

A readable description of the relationship between geomagnetic events and aurora can be found here [noaa.gov].

Re:Yet another stereotype confifrmed.

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Heh. Prepare to be downmodded by the overly sensitive. He's a good egg. I saw him on NASA TV doing one of their endless lame daily interviews with schoolkids, and he answered the inevitable "What do you miss most?" question with "A hot shower and cold beer". Ya gotta love an honest answer instead of the usual astronaut-speak.

Re:twitpic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitpic is a picture usually posted on a Twitter account. http://twitter.com/astrosoichi is the address for Mr. Noguchi's public Twitter account. His pictures are quite priceless.

Best. Space pic. Ever.

[The Bad Astronomer]

FWIW, I posted on my blog [discovermagazine.com] about this amazing pic from Soichi, explaining it a bit and giving my thoughts.

Re:Beautiful.

[KingArthur10]

The EXIF on that photo says 13 seconds at ISO 200 and f/2.8 with a Nikon D2Xs. Even though that camera is a 2006 model, I'd think it would have been able to take acceptable ISO800 photos which could chop that exposure down to about 3 seconds or so. I'm going to assume that the camera was modified to remove the Near IR/IR filter, but if not, that would definitely help the reds come through better.

With less motion, the colors would have been able to compound better, and I'm betting that an ISO800 shot would have had better definition as the photon strikes would have a higher likelihood of compounding on top of each other rather than spreading across multiple pixels. Then again, I've never shot from space at an object moving 28,000kph relative to me. I'm guessing they don't have a TON of time to dink around with exposure settings, although 1000 tweets in, they must have a little spare time.

Photos of aurora

[fyngyrz]

Here are some photos [flickr.com] I took of auroras generated by the leading edge of this GMF disturbance in northeastern Montana.

NOAA warnings make no sense at all...

[mad flyer]

I'm on their various maillists since I discovered that sensible electronic tend to crash better when there is solar activity. (My old Palm III was resetting it's memory everytime their was anykind of solar burps). But their annoucement are cryptical at best. And last evening their mail said that:

Space Weather Message Code: WARK06
Serial Number: 162
Issue Time: 2010 Apr 05 1831 UTC

CANCEL WARNING: Geomagnetic K-Index of 6 expected
Cancel Serial Number: 161
Original Issue Time: 2010 Apr 05 1427 UTC

Comment: Earlier indications of anticipated geomagnetic storm activity are no
longer present.

NOAA Space Weather Scale descriptions can be found at
www.swpc.noaa.gov/NOAAscales

Which sounds like the opposite of the Slashdot summary...