Aurora Alert Oct. 21-22 / Thursday Night Conjunction Delight


Gosh, what a busy week, and it's only Wednesday. Congratulations to the NASA team for a flawless sample capture yesterday at Bennu. The OSIRIS-REx space probe successfully touched the surface of the asteroid, disturbed its ancient soil and rocks with a blast of nitrogen gas and snatched bits and pieces to return to Earth in 2023.You can take a tour of the asteroid and get to know its boulders by name in the video above. The agency will release new images of the sample acquisition at a news conference today beginning at 4 p.m. CDT (5 p.m. EDT). 

The author watches the aurora on a chilly evening several years back. The arc — visible in this photo — is the aurora's most common form. As activity increases, faint, parallel rays will often appear within the arc. Bob King

Tonight (Oct. 21) and tomorrow night we have a shot a seeing the northern lights. As the sun is now near the minimum of its 11-year cycle, coronal holes rather than solar flares are primarily responsible for sending the particles than incite auroras at Earth. Coronal holes are large regions in the sun's outer atmosphere (called the corona) where material isn't magnetically bound to its surface and flows freely into space.

A large coronal hole is behind this week's expected aurora. Space weather forecasters at NOAA predict a minor geomagnetic storm on both nights from about 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. CDT. Although the moon will be out it's less than half and shouldn't pose a problem. Keep an eye on the lower half of the northern sky for a pale, greenish arc and possibly pillars and rays. Here's the latest forecast and you can check here to see the extent of the aurora in near-real time.

If you're unsure if what you're seeing is aurora or city light pollution, take a couple of time exposures with a camera on a tripod and examine the image on back viewing screen. If you see green, it's almost certainly northern lights.

The bright, waxing crescent joins Jupiter and Saturn Thursday night (Oct. 22). Stellarium

On Thursday evening, Oct. 22, the waxing moon will make a sweet, little triangle with Jupiter and Saturn in the southern sky. If you look at the trio early on, the moon will be at a similar distance from either planet. Later, the moon appears closer to Saturn because it's always moving eastward (to the left in the northern hemisphere) in its orbit around the Earth at the rate of one diameter per hour. 


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